Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.

—Edward Said / “Reflections on Exile”

Researchers have discovered a ‘whale graveyard’ at the bottom of a 7,000-metre-deep ocean chasm. Using the submersible vehicle Fendouzhe, the team recovered 476 fossilized bones belonging to a range of beaked whale species — one of which was dated to more than 5 million years ago. Why these bones collected in the canyon is unclear, but it’s by no means a thing of the past. The team also found the carcasses of recently-deceased whales, which are finding new life as food for a host of deep-sea creatures — many of which are thought to be unknown to science.

— Jacob Smith / “Video: whale necropolis under the sea” / Nature Brief

Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick up
receiver        voice says “The answer is awe.”
Still don’t know what to do with it last September right
before I was diagnosed        and the dream is still irritating
I have a checkup Friday 

— Alice Notley / “The Answer Is Awe”

There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it’s all right there in front of you. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That’s what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.

— Kim Stanley Robinson / Shaman

Truth drives the stars

straight into the dark.
I woke to the sun

and thought, with
a start, of how

I love the truth
and why.

— Susan Stewart / “In the Dark”

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present.

— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance

I’m wearing the same shirt I wore here that year,
that year we gave up our standoffs and skirmishes
and took up tenderness.
Barring some crisis, our clothing will outlive us,
none of which we mentioned while holding hands on the dock at duskfall
as the darkness bloomed in us, though not like flowers,
and daytime shut itself down.

— Margaret Atwood / “Berlin”

What I’m Listening To:

Does it make much sense
To build another fence
When no one is knockin’ on the door?

— Eels / “Cap in Hand”