Adversaria (26)
‘Again: I highlight here the naturalist’s art of attention not because scientists don’t have rich and complex modes of attention. Rather, we might do better science—attend better—if we have better narratives, grounded in arts of noticing that open to and allow for noticing in contexts that are already disturbed, already impure’ —Alexis Shotwell (Against Purity, p. 106)
‘We all know people who freely talk about the brotherhood of man while treating their neighbours as enemies, just as we also know people who have, in fact, excellent relations with all their neighbours while harbouring, at the same time, appalling prejudices about all human groups outside their particular circle’ — E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 70)
‘A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell. A panting, nostalgic smell that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 47%)
‘For what can a poet do before history’s bulldozer but guard the spring and trees, visible and invisible, by the old roads’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 72%)
‘If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being criticised for making a decision’ —Dan Davies (The Unaccountability Machine, p. 31)
‘Being largely dependent upon books for stimulation, they are apt, like the generality of historians, to set too high a value on the rôle of thought in culture’ —Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, p. 11)
‘You fear for the present stifled by the hegemony of the past and fear for the past from the absurdity of the present. You do not know where to stand at this crossroads’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 78%)
‘Knowing a great deal of detail about a subset of a system has a habit of increasing your confidence in your opinions disproportionately from their reliability’ —Dan Davies (The Unaccountability Machine, p. 70)
‘The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion—political or otherwise—which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to their existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies on of the great dangers of our time’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 88f.)