Deborah Poe

“With every tightening of the screw, the tyrant makes our hope more precise. And nothing enrages a tyrant more than hope.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“The woman who wrote in to upbraid Orwell for talking about roses seemed to think that paying attention to that which does not need to be changed is idleness, dissipation, and distraction. Those focused on injustice, on those things that the more we contemplate them the more we want to change them, tend to think of contemplation of what we don’t want to change as akin to shirking one’s duty or dodging awareness of what we do want to change. I’ve talked about it as, instead, regeneration of the energy to face destruction, but Scarry suggests it might also matter as a study of the templates of the desirable and the good. What is the goal of social change or political engagement? Can studying what good already exists or has existed be part of the work? There is, of course, a meaningful difference between the dour (and widespread) position that we are forever starting from scratch because everything is contaminated or corrupt and the position that the good exists as a kind of seed that needs to be tended more energetically or propagated more widely.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses