Jenesis > Recent Status Updates

Half an hour past midnight, Death came for him.
And for the little family curled up and asleep on a blue cross-stitch counterpane? What came for them?
Not Death. Just the end of living.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.

And it wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.

"Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavior racism affects our perception of the world."

"One of racism's harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive. And, even worse, the Black screw-up, who faces the abyss after one error, while the white screw-up is handed second chances and empathy."

"The root problem, from Prince Henry to President Trump, has always been the interest of racial power."

"Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make white people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas."

"What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? 'As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.' Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?"

"'He took his own life' is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life... How few of us...can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is a question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life...there is a difference between addition and increase."

"Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end?"

"I survived. "He survived to tell the tale"--that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

"Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping."

"What does it mean that we are better able to see pain than love? That rage and conflict in art are perceived as deeply felt, while reconciliation and joy are dismissed as mere sentiment? Does it reveal more about how broken we are than about the art itself?"

"What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege--while the battle rages all around--to disengage. Did Wong [Kim Ark] disengage? You cannot be sure...you constantly worry about what it means to engage. You have learned that between intention and liberation, a lot, maybe everything, can go wrong."

"Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility."

"Culture is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas, and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture is inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each out in our full humanity."

"Resegregation happens through design and through apathy. It also grows through our blindness--whether willed, imperceivable, or fixed through the best of our intentions--to the deep connections between us all."

"When students protested, it was not anti-free speech, it was the practice of free speech. Critics drew a direct line between protest and censorship, but speaking up about injustice is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like."..."Racial attacks and hate speech, as well as the 'anti-PC' defense of them, are proof that free speech is not a neutral good equally available to all."

People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person -- the little person down here on the earth -- be that?

"You'd be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person."

Picked back up here! (Returned to library)

"I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you."

"...when each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises."

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting

Chapter 2 (The Language of Trees) -- Trees communicate in many ways: Electrical signals (1/3rd an inch/min), fungal connections, sound (roots stretch towards other crackling roots!), and scent (leaves release warning scent for other trees in times of danger; they also release a scent to attract predators of pests). Cultivated crops don't have these communication skills, which is why they are so susceptible to bugs.

Chapter 1 (Friendships) -- Trees in undisturbed forests create networks in which they coexist to support each other. This includes intermingling roots with same species others to help nourish back to health in times of illness. They will also respect canopy growth among mates. Root-connected trees may also keep well-connected stumps alive to maintain network.

...there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.