Ben Ehrenreich > Quotes

“Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“Only once did I make Shireen sit down with me for a formal interview. She talked about the need to rebuild what she called "the culture of resistance" that she remembered experiencing during the Second Intifada, but which had since evaporated, replaced by a dull consumerist individualism, by "this illusion that if I forget about Palestine, build a career, take a loan, buy a car, build a house, watch Arab Idol on TV, it's all be okay; that if they're not raiding *your* house, you're okay." In a culture constructed around a shared goal of liberation, she said, "my house is your house and your son is my son and if they kill me today they will kill you tomorrow." (103)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“(Benjamin again: “Gambling converts time into a narcotic.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own
labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call “civilization,” history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The past was mainly rotten, but it appeared to have passed. The present was pure ebullient collapse. And the future? It hadn’t happened yet.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“In “The Writing of the God,” Borges also described that whirling wheel of time as a fabric embroidered with impossible complexity. (The words text and textile are both from the Latin texere, to weave: writing is, perhaps first of all, woven, a fabric of overlapping threads.) His imprisoned priest glimpsed the entire weave at once without any of the comforting lies of narrative, without cutting it down to a single and seductive swathe that, once chosen, negates all other possibilities and obscures the remainder of the cloth from which it’s spun.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“I remember, when I was a kid, staring at road maps, the kind you bought at gas stations and carried in the glove box, and that were, for me at least, impossible to properly refold. I remember looking at all those intersecting lines representing roads laid over and carved through the earth, dirt tracks and superhighways, the insolent grids of the cities. I wanted to follow them all to the end. I remember thinking that if you could get hold of all the maps for the entire country, or even the hemisphere, and spread them out side by side, it would be obvious that every road leads to every other road, that everything is connected. The dull suburban lane on which I lived would carry me eventually to rocky paths in Patagonia and the rutted logging roads that cross Alaska. There were dead ends, of course, lots of them, but assuming you were free to backtrack, it was impossible, really, to get lost. You could follow any road in any direction and eventually, by however circuitous a path, get where you needed to go. Oceans notwithstanding. I don’t remember talking to anyone about this. As a child you learn to guard your thoughts, to hold close to ideas that seemed simple and self-evident and that you knew adults would scoff at. What counted as education seemed to mainly involve learning to walk in single file and otherwise keep quiet. School meant grown-ups telling you that things had to be done in a certain way, and in no other, that however many obvious and inviting paths might lead from one point to another, only one of them was right. The rest might as well not exist at all. To do well, to earn praise, you had to learn not to see them anymore.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Mythical time was then replaced by messianic time, which was necessarily linear: it led somewhere. The regeneration of the cosmos no longer recurred in cycles according to a sacred calendar, but was deferred into the future. It would come when God willed it. Time had a beginning and an end, and through them, a meaning. By the twentieth century, deprived of God and the possibility of future redemption but stuck nonetheless on this now single-tracked time, humanity faced a new challenge: how to “tolerate” history, as Eliade”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“I remember standing in front of the house and almost falling down in a moment of dizzying comprehension, staring at the Milky Way or the polestar and understanding with my body as much as my mind where we were in the universe and how and where we were moving. I felt like I’d been punched. More than with any political or philosophical revelation, the entirety of my perspective on existence—which, despite all my convictions and everything I understood in the abstract, was nonetheless centered on the earth, and for the most part on this particular North American landmass, and on this minuscule body and the tiny and petty radius that extends from my eyes and thoughts and emotions—all of it shattered.”
― Ben Ehrenreich

“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin mentions that when workers in Paris rose up against the monarchy of Charles X in July 1830, they “simultaneously and independently” began shooting at public clocks around the city.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“(Smohalla, a Wanapum prophet from the Pacific Northwest, exhorted his followers to abandon all the ways of the white man and not to plough or harvest or work in any way, “because men who work cannot dream.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Time collapses here. It can have no linear reach. Everything that might ever happen has already happened, and will again, forever. What is left to fear? The concept of progress becomes a very silly joke. Any possible advancement is “locked up on each earth and disappears with it.” Instead, “always and everywhere, on the terrestrial camp, the same drama, the same set, on the same narrow stage, a noisy humanity, infatuated by its own greatness, thinking itself to be the universe and inhabiting its prison like an immensity, only to drown soon along with the globe.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“I read today’s news last month but this time it’s worse.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Walter Benjamin’s conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the “time of now” is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: “scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.”) If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The desert enforces its own perspective. It shrinks you and puts eternity in the foreground. If you’re open to it, and don’t mind a diminished role in this drama, it insists, quietly, on the surging beauty of all things and non-things living and dead and not-formally-alive.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“If all clocks strive to represent—in various forms, with hands and digits and shadows and bells—the spinning of the earth on its axis, and calendars in their myriad forms represent the interactions of the earth with the sun and the moon and sometimes the rising and setting of the planets, could it make sense to suggest that the earth is also a clock? Just a bigger one, with a wider grip on time? And if the earth is a clock, why not the other planets? Why not Pluto? And what about the sun and the stars and the galaxies, the black holes at their centers, the clusters of galaxies and the larger bodies that they form, all the swirling stuff of the cosmos—what time does it tell?”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“I had almost forgotten about the bougainvillea, how bright they are, explosions of pink climbing the stucco walls, and how soft the light is in the afternoon, how it makes the colors seem magically deeper and it really does feel like anything is possible. For a long time, that light was enough to sustain me there. [in Los Angeles]”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Las Vegas might be easier to take if I understood it not as a city but as a dream the desert is dreaming about itself. I found the thought reassuring even if it means, as it must, that I am a part of the dream too, and it will soon transmute into another dream, as dreams always do, and then disappear and fade quickly from the recollections of the dreamer, whoever that may be.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Human history was for him a rational process, and also a divine one. Subjected to the vigilance of philosophy, the logic propelling it would reveal itself, but only after the fact. History was the very thought of God as it developed over time. It formed a single epic narrative, the story of the growing self-consciousness of Spirit, of God coming to know himself, through us, in time. The trajectory was clear: from slavery to freedom. (Not incidentally, this could also be expressed geographically: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another…The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time