Quotes from Ben Ehrenreich

How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.

Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience.

Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call "civilization," history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be "blasted out" and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.

Benjamin again: "Gambling converts time into a narcotic.")

To know where the stars are is to know what time it is, what day and what year. Time is not an independent vector that pushes on, stubborn and cocksure, taking us to a place called the future. It lives in our bodies and in the stars, in the mountains that rise up from the sea floors, in the wind and rain that wash the mountains back into the sea. Everything moves. Mountains and oceans as well as stars.

I had almost forgotten about the bougainvillea, how bright they are, explosions of pink climbing the stucco walls, and how soft the light is in the afternoon, how it makes the colors seem magically deeper and it really does feel like anything is possible. For a long time, that light was enough to sustain me there. [in Los Angeles]

Las Vegas might be easier to take if I understood it not as a city but as a dream the desert is dreaming about itself. I found the thought reassuring even if it means, as it must, that I am a part of the dream too, and it will soon transmute into another dream, as dreams always do, and then disappear and fade quickly from the recollections of the dreamer, whoever that may be.

Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin mentions that when workers in Paris rose up against the monarchy of Charles X in July 1830, they "simultaneously and independently" began shooting at public clocks around the city.

Yesterday's panicked fears are today's sober expectations.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Smohalla, a Wanapum prophet from the Pacific Northwest, exhorted his followers to abandon all the ways of the white man and not to plough or harvest or work in any way, "because men who work cannot dream.")

unavoidable violence of writing and its origin as a tool for the maintenance of the repressive hierarchies of early states.

Worlds end all the time.

The past was mainly rotten, but it appeared to have passed. The present was pure ebullient collapse. And the future? It hadn't happened yet.