Fiona’s Reviews > Is a River Alive? > Status Update

"How we imagine the matter of water matters. To recognize its ceaseless migrancy is to recognize that we live in a fundamentally decentralized world, engaged always in multiple forms of relation – and that power can be crucial in determining the capacity of those relations to animate or to exhaust their participants."

"Many details of what is known as the ‘Coromandel Slave Trade’ are only now coming to light – for the Dutch have been more efficient than even the British at disguising the barbarisms of their empire."

"The area is honeycombed by termites, but the villagers give rice to the termites each morning, so that the termites don’t eat their buildings. And it works! I am very interested in this idea of so-called “pest species” being better understood as “tax collectors” for the more-than-human world.’"

"To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’."

"A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge – and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase."