Paromita’s Reviews > Traversal > Status Update

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.