Цитаты из книги The Anthropocene Reviewed

I've spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn't for anything, that it doesn't mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little.But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I'm able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know.

And most of all, I am here to be. To be not just on this planet, but with it. I am here to be with you, to be with my family, and even to be with this forest. The gift is being itself, and who better to show us that than the oldest lady in town.

Alice Walker once wrote, "All history is current," and I think that's true in so many ways. History presses into us, shaping contemporary experience. History changes as we look back on the past from different presents. And history is electric current, too-charged and flowing. It takes power from some sources and delivers it to others. Sander once said he believed photography could help "hold fast the history of the world."but there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.

Despair isn't very productive. That's the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself. If playing What's Even the Point made me a more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection, I'd be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything. It's hard to sleep, but it's also hard not to.

I don't want to give in to despair; I don't want to take refuge in the detached ridicule of emotion. I don't want to be cool if cool means being cold to or distant from the reality of experience.

Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you're an idiot for even trying.When the game is being played, I feel certain it will never end. But that is a lie, like most certainties. Now always feels infinite and never is. I was wrong about life's meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and I'm wrong about it now. The truth is far more complicated than mere hopelessness.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let's imagine's Earth's history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn't appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren't part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm.

It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horros that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scaed that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass.

But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability". I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.