Thai D

“Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They're like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Neither season after season of extreme weather events nor the risk of extinction for a million animal species around the world could push environmental destruction to the top of our country’s list of concerns. And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.) Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through