The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse.”

— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration

“Walking on a path is an adventure. No step is ever the same as another. One never knows what might be waiting around the next bend. The terrain varies, the ground cover varies, and the body must exert itself in a number of ways. As exercise, walking on paths is the best. I’ve heard stories about people who have walked their way out of spinal prolapses and depression after doctors and psychologists have tried for years to help them.”

— Torbjørn Ekelund / In Praise of Paths

“It occurs to me that we live in an era of extinction, and perhaps what will also be extinguished—for some of us, the brave ones, which I don’t think I am—will be our sense of self, the ego, the false and comfortable dreams we’ve constructed of ourselves.”

— Deborah Willis / “How Writing About Climate Change Can Become a Form of Escapism”

“For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though…nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche / The Birth of Tragedy

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

— Flannery O’Connor / Mystery and Manners

“In tears are sorrow. In tears are grief, in tears are anger. In tears are rage. In tears swallowed are cancer, hypertension, respiratory ailments. In tears swallowed is dis-ease. In tears shed is sometimes no relief on the other side.”

— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

— Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in The West

What I’m Listening To:

“Where’s the best place to sit if this all goes wrong?
Maybe the middle
Maybe the back
Well, what if I can’t get out?”

— Squid / “Greenlight”