passage to blackacre 3

This is all the Trump analysis you need.

Ms. Tippett: A story I have always loved that, to me, Dorothy Day, I just feel, gets quoted all the time, more and more. I mean, she’s — somehow she’s really come to the forefront of consciousness. And you do write about in your book A Paradise Built in Hell, which I loved so much. You write about the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, which killed 3,000 people and annihilated the center of the city, as you say, and shattered this hundred-mile stretch.

But Dorothy Day was in Oakland, she’s eight years old, she watches this thing that, in some place you describe as, you say, yes, people fall apart, but in disaster, there’s also this falling together that we don’t chronicle. And she — the questions she asked was, she saw, to me — this is me looking at this — she saw that people were capable of this, that all along, they knew how to do this, right? To take...

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: ...care of each other. And she said...

Ms. Solnit: Yeah.

Ms. Tippett: …“Why can’t we live this way all the time?”

Ms. Solnit: No, that is her formative experience. She said while the disaster lasted, people loved one another. And Dorothy Day is such a key figure for that book, both because the earthquake becomes a spiritual awakening and kind of the template for what she pursues in her life, and because she’s somebody who had a partner and a child, and she kept the child, but she gave up family life for this larger sense of community she pursued as the founder of Catholic Worker.

And she treated poverty as the disaster in which she would create this kind of communitas..." --Rebecca Solnit interview

Ressentiment and schooling.

"It’s important to say that the idea of Mars as a lifeboat is wrong, in both a practical and a moral sense.

There is no Planet B, and it’s very likely that we require the conditions here on earth for our long-term health. When you don’t take these new biological discoveries into your imagined future, you are doing bad science fiction.

In a culture so rife with scientism and wish fulfillment, a culture that's still coming to grips with the massive crisis of climate change, a culture that's inflicting a sixth mass-extinction event on earth and itself, it’s important to try to pull your science fiction into the present, to make it a useful tool of human thought, a matter of serious planning as well as thrilling entertainment.

This is why Musk’s science fiction story needs some updating, some real imagination using current findings from biology and ecology." --Kim Stanley Robinson

(via elixir of knowledge dot com)