Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

My parents taught me solitude is another form of survival.

— Saúl Hernández / “A Note on Solitude”

I felt like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk. I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woe for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see any black space again, and of course — needless to say — thoughts of this kind made me feel guilty.

— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.

— Margaret Atwood / “February”

But even the rubble in Gaza has meaning to us. It is where our loved ones lived and died. When the time comes, we are the only people who will be removing what must be removed, only to reuse it to rebuild.

— Mosab Abu Toha / “Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians” / The New Yorker

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.

— China Miéville / The City & The City

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. 

— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

What I’m Listening To: 

Polythene bags, they’ll never go away
Us dogs and rats, will never escape
If you said it could be better out,
l probably won’t believe you
I’ll knock the teeth out my head
And we’ll see

— Squid / “Cowards”