Quotes from Ben Ehrenreich

Walter Benjamin's conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the "time of now" is "shot through with chips of Messianic time." (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: "scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.") If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." That line is on his tombstone now.

What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?

That apocalypse is always with us: all the joy that I take from this land has been contingent on the destruction of someone else's world.

Before it was anything else, the doctrine of progress was a theory of white supremacy.

Which is to say, the same things that will likely do us in: the greed and blindness of the few, the hungers of the many, a fatal inattention to the fragile web of life on which our existence here depends.

Thompson was, by all accounts, a confident man, and not one to be inconvenienced by ignorance if it happened

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read.

Ursula K. Le Guin: "One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.")

But no escape is possible. Capital shrinks space, compresses time.

A single message, no matter how apparently unambiguous, can mean more than one thing. I'm counting on it.

In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K'iche'. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington's careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.

This is perhaps a more useful way to think about the shape of time—not as a line or an arrow or a circle or a spiral, but something living, a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off. "The world is always new," wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, "however old its roots.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time

Decades of scrupulous and unrelenting pragmatism carried us here. The minimum necessary for survival now counts as madness. The courses of action still deemed practical will usher us straight down the path that leads to our own deaths.

I read today's news last month but this time it's worse.

For the inhabitants of the Great Plains of North America and the desert Southwest, where I now live, Armageddon would be slower to catch up. That apocalypse is always with us: all the joy that I take from this land has been contingent on the destruction of someone else's world.

Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging.

The desert enforces its own perspective. It shrinks you and puts eternity in the foreground. If you're open to it, and don't mind a diminished role in this drama, it insists, quietly, on the surging beauty of all things and non-things living and dead and not-formally-alive.

We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.

T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.

Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth.