Sublime

This gets to the crux of the Woolf that has been most exemplary for me: she is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world.

We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures.

The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself.

Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

A march is when bodies speak by walking, when private citizens become that mystery the public, when traversing the boulevards of cities becomes a way to travel toward political goals.