ruminating on being human
Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021) . ‘ And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’
Erica Berry • ‘Playing animal’ reflects back our yearnings and repulsions | Aeon Essays
“Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.”
— A quote from It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken
"And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by
... See more— A quote from the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey
“Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness.”
— A quote from the book I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
“Isn't it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are... Were forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different.”
— A quote from the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey
“Pick a single creature on this earth and it's story will be the earth's story, he suddenly thinks. It can tell you everything, that one creature. The whole history of the world, the whole likely future of the world.”
— A quote from the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey
have you ever noticed how all those wellness tiktoks are about getting back to the core of being human. when we first evolved as homo sapiens we were out in nature & understood its power & priority. now we’ve built all this stuff and the majority of it is just bullshit and distractions.
i feel like we must have been so knowledgeable but in a
... See more“You must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn't know when to stop.“
— A quote from the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime... Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief... See more