Status Updates From Traversal

And yet here we are, between the dice, between the trees—probable impossibilities, each of us a brief traversal between not yet and never again, having only these arms to hold the borrowed atoms that we love.
That is enough.

Life begins, with a spark of sentience catalyzed by chemistry and chance, and then it ends, with death. The great mystery is not the fable of what lies beyond. The great mystery is what we make of the wilderness between the bookends, how to make these fragile leaves of being as lush with love as possible—love of particular others, love of all that is other, love of life-

It takes a grandeur of spirit to metabolize an infatuation into friendship.

...We are editing it, this very moment, the genome of knowledge and the genome of possibility forever entwined.

In the catacombs of culture we call history, there is no mutability—stories ossify into a kind of menacing immortality. But culture itself—the living creature of it—is mutable so long as we go on revising its DNA—the symbolic logic of customs, beliefs, and forms of being. Everything we call progress is but the gene editing of our cultural genome. It is editable.

All causality is the story we tell ourselves of how we got to now. Every story is the story of the world.

We may borrow the axes and hammers from our culture, but in our habits of victimhood and blame, we are always the breakers of our own hearts.

In an era when Florence Nightingale’s hygiene reforms were not yet widespread and most soldiers died not from their wounds but from infectious disease in the wards,when the notion of bedside manner was a laughable extravagance, Whitman recognized that “there is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world.”

Meanwhile Whitman commemorated Brown in a poem, seeing the “old man, tall, with white hair,” as an emissary of this “year of meteors,” parenthetically projecting himself as a spectator of the execution, as if to remind his reader that every life is witness to every death:

Hardly will you find another people who were so oppressed, mistreated and trampled upon, excluded from education and kept in ignorance by violent means, and who nonetheless possess so much natural delicacy, decency, and dignified civility.

Every human being—especially with a lively imagination—longs … for something that lies outside the limitations of his daily life and that can elevate him … above life’s sorrows and burdens. The educated person finds it in the enjoyment of art, travel, society, and literature—things from which these poor colored people have been excluded from the start.

Sometimes we must go to the end of the world, to the last horizon and past it, to find our way home. Sometimes home is a horizon.

she recognized that just as atoms constellate into patterns to become the molecules of matter that compose our bodies, customs and beliefs constellate into patterns of culture that compose our minds, our personalities, our worldview.

ulture is a pattern of symbols that make up “the total configuration of the individual” through constant dynamic interaction. A chemistry not of atoms but of symbols, shaping our emotional responses and our motives, our beliefs and our behaviors.

Instead, she discovered that culture—the whole blooming buzzing chaos of it—is the root of a nation’s language, its repertoire of creativity, ; she discovered that human society is a poetic problem of composition and that the genius of culture is its configuration—not what things are in absolute terms but how they orient relative to each other, how they fit together to constellate the cosmos of meaning.

Both feeling states, she would reflect decades after the candlelit sublimation, were her protests against the abyss between the ideal world of her imagination—her “beautiful country,” her “Delectable Mountains”—and the real world in which the prayers were said and the absence unspoken.

...And so she buried herself in work and routine—“to keep suicide from becoming too strong for me in an unguarded moment,”

Ruth felt much of her loneliness sprang from her unchosen chromosomes in a culture hostile to women’s intellectual and creative potential, with its “cruelly wasteful” ideal of womanhood in the attainment of “a great love, a quiet home, and children.” She wasn’t sure she wanted that. She wasn’t sure what to want instead.

The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want but knowing what we want—the simplest, deepest measure of knowing who we are.

We are composite creations of our genetic and cultural inheritance, shaped by the biological ancestors chance has dealt us and shaped equally by the spiritual ancestors we have chosen for ourselves.

Every artist, every maker of import and impact on the world, is both creator and Creature.

Writing more than two centuries after his [Cervantes] literary heyday, as I write two centuries after hers [Mary Shelley], perhaps she took quiet pleasure in celebrating him in history’s redemption, found quiet consolation in the long cycles on which the true estimation of genius operates.