Ab Aeterno #1
Well, hello reader and welcome to the first version of Ab Aeterno!
Thanks for signing up, and for being part of this exercise with me. Currently, most of my time (and mind) is occupied by toddler activities and baby stuff..so having this newsletter gives me an excuse to find the time to actually read about other things, and by having you signed up as well I feel that I’ve committed myself to something (I usually stick to promises, even the ones I’ve voluntarily created by myself for myself). Anyways, these mails will be fairly straightforward - I’ll be sharing some articles or essays I’ve stumbled upon on the web accompanied by a couple of thoughts from my side. Happy reading!
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Quote of the week:
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
– Leo Tolstoy
1. I miss it all - Against the commodification of community by Devin Kelly
Devin looks at the ways in which capitalism is trying to commodify community. He reflects on what we stand to lose and what we can protect by being part of the resistance. Living in a time where more or less everything is being commodified I really think he nails it with this piece. It’s a bit scary because it is true.. and it makes me wonder what I can do myself in order to avoid falling into this trap of hollow relations.
"If friendship becomes commodified and the experience of community becomes increasingly eliminated of the various intricacies of being among people, we lose the sometimes hard, sometimes surprising, sometimes fucked up, sometimes beautiful paths that are not simply the same path each day. Maybe we lose learning how to apologize. Maybe we lose learning how to say thank you. We lose, almost certainly, many moments of gratitude. We lose friends delivering thermometers. Tiny useless canes that end up meaning the world. We lose our various saint friends. Those people in our lives who carry themselves while they carry us. I don’t know what they’d be replaced by. I do, though. Fake high fives. Co-working spaces with glass-panelled offices. Product-driven social networks. Guided workouts attended by so many people, each in a room by themselves."
2. The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature - William Cronon’s blog
William examines and studies the way we have set up a modern idea of wilderness as something apart from ourselves, and which is pure and must remain so. The fundamental critique, I think, of setting nature and wilderness apart as “cathedrals”, so to speak, is in this paragraph:
”This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honourable human place in nature might actually look like….
…we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be the most precious part—aloof from its entanglements. We work our nine-to-five jobs in its institutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century.”
3. The Black Void of the Moon by Maria Bustillos
Maria Bustillos talks about growing up, loneliness, and the existential angst of discovering the things that are wrong with the world. She ends on an optimistic note:
“We don’t know whether the engine down there will ignite, as we speed through the void: we don’t and we won’t. The matter is out of our hands. It seems there’s no way out. And there’s not.
It depends how one is constituted, but the various balms we have, of music, love, philosophy, religion, friendship, literature and art, of all the kinds of understanding we can hope for or try to have, might serve to bring us all to the other side again. Surely one should be ready to come back into the light. Just in case.”...
4. Book recommendation: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
I’m actually not done with this one so it is a bit unfair to be recommending it already, however, it’s a great read so you might as well just read it. I never really enjoyed his movies much because I found them too simple (and I have somehow convinced myself that watching movies should be an educational experience) - but - he is a brilliant storyteller, writer and actor, carrying a swell of depth in his story that reminds us about the importance of self-discovery. He is effusive and ebullient in his prescriptions for rediscovering the one among the many, and I find myself smiling quite often while reading his book.
“Travel & humanity have been my greatest educators. They have helped me understand the common denominator of mankind. Values. Engage with yourself then engage with the world. Values travel.”
5. Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever
“One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”