No.251

Annie Dillard January 21, 2025

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bir... See more

When we mourn the extreme levels of suffering in the world together as a community, we can be held and hold others as we each go through our own personal cycles of grief, or what the Germans refer to as Weltschmerz (a deep sadness about the imperfection of the world). Such communal solidarity can get us through our darkest moments and ensure we red

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Ultimately, we learned (or at least some of us did) that if we look after each other, we can get through these kinds of things together. We learned the lesson that humans learn again and again about ourselves (and seem to need to learn again and again): that “the worst of times can often bring out the best in us.”56 We learned that resilience isn’t

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Here’s the most interesting part: none of the letters complained that I hadn’t told them “what to do.” Because I hadn’t. All I had done was share a few processes — pretty embryonic at the time — for how to deal with despair and what it can do for you to walk through that gate. No one complained that I hadn’t told them how to stop nuclear war, or ho

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