' It was the same world, but people were different.'
S. Alexievich.
The earth, the earth itself has absorbed the catastrophe, and is scarred by it. What kind of political and cultural institutions will emerge, what kind of human sensibilities will endure, or will there only be a human wilderness, a succession of blank years and forgetfulness? The poet remembers a line from former times, "Once we were beautiful, I'm sure of it."
Amy Davidson writes, in a fascinating New Yorker piece, of the Great Famine ( 1315-1317). Years of rain and crop failure precipitated food shortages which by some estimates resulted in the death of up to 10% of the population. Patterns of settlement, the deep continuities of human ways of living are disrupted..a deep shadow is cast..the very idea of the future is brought into question: how to go on, what is essential to preserve and what can be let go off without a loss of identity? This already assumes that the human will remains intact and also, crucially, that its scope for action remains unimpaired. But in times of catastrophe both of those assumptions come under pressure.
' After that, nothing happened'
Plenty Coups
'We lived through everything, we survived everything..' but along the way we forgot much. How to find one's way back when there are no more paths?
To imagine a form of life is to imagine a language. But already the words we once knew with certainty have become obscure. I knew a word that was in nobody' heart.
There is no more image of Man, no more speech; we live as if in a dream, one moment unconnected to the next.
'A human being can be an enigma to himself because he doesn't know why he lives as he does..he understands his words but he is foreign to his life.'
After the deluge our alienation from nature, the world, is mirrored in our alienation from other people and ourselves. The strangeness of a time that does not pass and that makes the past incomprehensible.
~~~~
At Foyles you realize that they're not really interested in books. They're in the business of selling books (probably for not much longer though). So, unlike smaller book shops you sense they have a much keener eye on current interests and fads. The fact that the ground floors of the big shops are increasingly filled up with stationery, best sellers, mole leather notebooks and other paraphernalia makes you wonder..how much longer?( DHLs essay on the monks carrying the last remnants of European civilisation with them on their backs, the narrow margins by which the word survives seem irrelevant when one considers providence).
But you do wonder if the tide has turned. At the old Dillons fiction has been moved to the first floor. You read the list of books to look forward to in 2016 with horror since it's just another game.
Martha Nussbaum once wrote that at certain times, perhaps like ours, the idea of non- relative virtues and perspectives is dismissed and replaced by the thought ( or at least the feeling) that it's all a game, a third rate play on a rickety stage. In such an age chance or power determines outcomes. God, if he is still talked about is conceived as a distant, all-powerful " force".
~~~
The thought that human beings were an open- ended project, a work in progress, once struck as liberating. But now the lack of essence, of being, strikes us as shallow. The 'thin' view of rationality, the partial understanding of freedom, leaves us with a rather fragile notion of the self. 'The good' itself has become an empty word filled in by whatever we please.
The old peasant words in 'Voices' bear a weight that is carried by a thousand years of experience and contact with reality. Our own words and thoughts, in comparison, refer back to what, exactly?
S. Alexievich.
The earth, the earth itself has absorbed the catastrophe, and is scarred by it. What kind of political and cultural institutions will emerge, what kind of human sensibilities will endure, or will there only be a human wilderness, a succession of blank years and forgetfulness? The poet remembers a line from former times, "Once we were beautiful, I'm sure of it."
Amy Davidson writes, in a fascinating New Yorker piece, of the Great Famine ( 1315-1317). Years of rain and crop failure precipitated food shortages which by some estimates resulted in the death of up to 10% of the population. Patterns of settlement, the deep continuities of human ways of living are disrupted..a deep shadow is cast..the very idea of the future is brought into question: how to go on, what is essential to preserve and what can be let go off without a loss of identity? This already assumes that the human will remains intact and also, crucially, that its scope for action remains unimpaired. But in times of catastrophe both of those assumptions come under pressure.
' After that, nothing happened'
Plenty Coups
'We lived through everything, we survived everything..' but along the way we forgot much. How to find one's way back when there are no more paths?
To imagine a form of life is to imagine a language. But already the words we once knew with certainty have become obscure. I knew a word that was in nobody' heart.
There is no more image of Man, no more speech; we live as if in a dream, one moment unconnected to the next.
'A human being can be an enigma to himself because he doesn't know why he lives as he does..he understands his words but he is foreign to his life.'
After the deluge our alienation from nature, the world, is mirrored in our alienation from other people and ourselves. The strangeness of a time that does not pass and that makes the past incomprehensible.
~~~~
At Foyles you realize that they're not really interested in books. They're in the business of selling books (probably for not much longer though). So, unlike smaller book shops you sense they have a much keener eye on current interests and fads. The fact that the ground floors of the big shops are increasingly filled up with stationery, best sellers, mole leather notebooks and other paraphernalia makes you wonder..how much longer?( DHLs essay on the monks carrying the last remnants of European civilisation with them on their backs, the narrow margins by which the word survives seem irrelevant when one considers providence).
But you do wonder if the tide has turned. At the old Dillons fiction has been moved to the first floor. You read the list of books to look forward to in 2016 with horror since it's just another game.
Martha Nussbaum once wrote that at certain times, perhaps like ours, the idea of non- relative virtues and perspectives is dismissed and replaced by the thought ( or at least the feeling) that it's all a game, a third rate play on a rickety stage. In such an age chance or power determines outcomes. God, if he is still talked about is conceived as a distant, all-powerful " force".
~~~
The thought that human beings were an open- ended project, a work in progress, once struck as liberating. But now the lack of essence, of being, strikes us as shallow. The 'thin' view of rationality, the partial understanding of freedom, leaves us with a rather fragile notion of the self. 'The good' itself has become an empty word filled in by whatever we please.
The old peasant words in 'Voices' bear a weight that is carried by a thousand years of experience and contact with reality. Our own words and thoughts, in comparison, refer back to what, exactly?
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