The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

“This part of the ritual was always a release.

Everyone relaxed and beamed. Another thought had been correctly thought, another feeling rightly felt. One saw how little the Party asked, after all. You needn’t know all the latest Newspeak words or struggle to believe contradictory things. If you hated the enemy, you could be loved. People smiled dopily at each other, and some eyes welled with tears.

They had had a good Hate.”

— Sandra Newman / Julia

“The most powerful beings in the world are the ones that endure the most.”

— Blake Leeper / U.S. Paralympic Athlete / Headspace

“This feeling now that something has come into the house, she wants to put the baby down, she wants to stand and think, seeing how it stood with the two men and came into the hallway of its own accord, something formless yet felt. She can sense it skulking alongside her as she steps through the living room.”

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

“Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.”

— Amitav Ghosh / The Great Derangement

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”

— James Baldwin / TV interview excerpt, I Am Not Your Negro

“… history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave…”

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

What I’m Listening To:

“Enough about human rights
What about whale rights
What about snail rights …
What about plant rights
What about cat rights”

— Ghost Train Orchestra & Kronos Quartet / “Enough About Human Rights”