Paromita’s Reviews > Figuring > Status Update

I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.

[Margaret Fuller]
BY GENIUS BELONGING TO THE WORLD. It strikes me, this existential ecology, as the simplest, most perfect measure of an actualized life—far fuller than fame and success, more generous than personal love and its greedy affinities, more precise than happiness and its confused aims.

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

It was during that selfsame benefit, broadcast nationwide, that Kennedy rose above his moment, above all moments, to make his most enduring offering to culture:
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.

We are congenitally blind to the lasts of life—a survival mechanism of the human psyche driven by the same stubborn dissent from impermanence that drives our dreams of immortality.

Carson understood that the time of insects and the time of stars exist along a shared continuum, with the human animal, so grand in its ambitions and yet so perishable in its finite allotment of time, perched midway between them, beholden to both. A world without insects would be as dark as a world without stars, shorn of the shared stardust that makes a world a world.

Silent Spring sang hymnal proof of Whitman’s conviction that true democracy is accomplished at least as much—if not “doubly as much”—by “fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts” as it is by political laws. Carson had course-corrected government by employing the art of literature in the service of socially wakeful science.

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.

Beneath the placid surface of her [Rachel Carson] composure in the face of nonexistence roiled a volcanic restlessness to bring into being something without which the world itself could not go on existing—an island of difficult, lifesaving truth amid the ocean of civilizational delusion.

Nobody was talking about this moral dimension of science. Nobody was placing a hand on humanity’s shoulder and turning us away from this destructive hubris, shaking us into awareness, into humility, into wakefulness to the fragility of a miraculous world that flourished long before we trampled it with our arrogant footsteps and should continue to flourish long after we have gone.