Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Before I arrived to this city, I could feel the depression in my fingertips. It made my fingers tingle. Sadness is the most alive emotion. It gets into your nerves. Its pulses feel like insects at the rim of your skin.

— Victoria Chang / “The Tree, 1964”

… we are heading into the peak of what you might call greenhouse season, when one can be sadly certain of hideous news. Right now we are seeing a heatwave of truly monstrous proportion across Asia—the temperature in New Delhi these past days has topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in its recorded history.

— Bill McKibben / “Intensity” / Substack

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go?

— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter

Experts say that by June parts of the city’s central valley could reach “day zero,” when there isn’t enough water to pump out to the city, even if the typical rainy season starts that month… The growing scarcity of water in several parts of Mexico is a bellwether of how worsening climate change may affect cities all over the world, experts say.

— Marina E. Franco / “Mexico City is running out of water, forcing many to ration” / Noticias Telemundo for Axios

In the middle of nightmares: certainly
I have lived too long in an atmosphere of hatred.

Discipline propels me through the arid superstructure
Insisting “stop and think, pick and choose”

— Laurance Wieder / “Water is the Mother of Ice”

… the combination of dropping oxygen levels, rising acidification and soaring ocean heat was also seen at the end of the Permian period about 252m years ago, when Earth experienced the largest known extinction event in its history, known as the Great Dying.

— Oliver Millman / “Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification” / The Guardian

I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm.

— Victoria Chang / “The Tree, 1964”

What I’m Listening To:

He was a vampire whose time had come
He was a vampire snowman who stayed up
Stayed up to see the sun

— Hannah Marcus / “Vampire Snowman”