Alex

“By high school, the flicker of interest is for many kids vanished. As we age, the awareness of the social world often crowds out interest in the natural one, perhaps ever more so as the social world expands into vast electronic form. My favorite Thoreau book, left now in a classroom somewhere, was a series of fragments from his journals opposite full-page photographs of leaves, rocks, clouds, a narrow stream or an abandoned nest. Seeing requires a sense of solitude, if not its truth, a willingness to push away for a moment our worries about who we are to other people to take in what is before our nose.”
― Spotted Toad, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others’ tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. We know the shape, and the shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection.)”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”2”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy