Sublime

Once individuals know that they will be taken care of if they get ill, that their children can be well educated at reasonable cost, and that they will have a pension at the end of their working lives, they are free to pursue a lower-impact and more satisfying style of life.

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told

The sculptor at the end of his day simply sweeps away the heaps of useless dust and shards of stone. So does Nature. But those discarded scraps from the natural workshop are the bodies of creatures who moments before were alive, creatures like you and me. Nature creates by placing her inventions in competition with each other. In the world of human

widespread, insidious shifts in how we experience each other face to face, not just in our most intimate relationships but also in our communities and public spaces

modern-day eugenics enrolls each of us in its blood-soaked imagination—asking us to shoulder social problems, inviting us to purchase an illusion of safety, making any demand for robust public investment in the goods, services, and infrastructure required for everyone to live well appear unimaginable.

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things “as they are,” or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.

Rachel Naomi Remen, who once observed,