Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order... A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

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Politics is the art of the

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different

the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”