audrey’s Reviews > The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet > Status Update

I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I either understand or examine.

But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth said, “To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.”

I don’t buy the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty.

Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back…. But the memory still holds me together.

We were not afraid to say “I love you” to each other.

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means.

I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return.

I was worried at the end of college would spell the end of our relationship, and I wanted her to reassure me, to tell me that I need to not fear being alone, because she would always be there, and etc. But she wasn’t the sort of person to make false promises, and most promises featuring the word “always” are unkeepable. Everything ends, or at least everything humans have thus far observed ends.

Even if geese have become mundane, there remains something awe-inspiring about seeing them fly overhead in a perfect V formation. As one enthusiast put it, the Canada goose “excites the imagination and quickens the heartbeat.” More than pigeons or mice or rats, geese still feel wild to me.