What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.
That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
Tamamen şaşırmış bir şekilde, "Dünyanın en büyük yalanı nedir? " diye sordu Çocuk.
Şu: hayatımızın belli bir noktasında, başımıza gelenlerin kontrolünü kaybediyoruz ve yaşamlarımız kader tarafından kontrol ediliyor. Bu dünyanın en büyük yalanıdır."
You are worlds that spin in orbit,
a star who rose and fell;
infinity summoned for audit—
a penny toss in the wishing well.
But they see us as we see the animals in the forest.
“The domestics. They are the others who straddle both worlds, other birds, dogs, turtles, cows, goats, sheep, snakes, rabbits—and yes, even cats. The domestics are the last of your kind, and they will be the very last of mankind’s legacy. Buildings are crumbling, paper is disintegrating, mold and bacteria are quiet conquerors, and the soil is claiming back what is hers. The forces of The Whole have been contained and controlled for too long, and when those who break free from their cages do so they will not do it quietly. Humankind’s stories in paint and ink and machine and structures that reach for the sun, they will all go. What is left is you. Millions of domestics have died, but there are still many, many more, stuck and abandoned and looking for a savior. Growth and evolution depend on our changing relationship to the beings around us. If you want to help mankind, this is what you must do. It is your choice, Crow.”
“It is divided in the way that all worlds are divided between people: between those who are listened to and those who aren’t.”
“It is divided in the way that all worlds are divided between people: between those who are listened to and those who aren’t.”
Sayfa 27Kitabı okudu
my darlings. living is difficult. it is difficult for everybody.and it is at that moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized hole. that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years. cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world. there are so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love. with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply important to accept that we are not the masters of this place. we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
and then there are days when the simple act of breathing
leaves you exhausted. it seems easier to give up on this life.
the thought of disappearing brings you peace. for so long i
was lost in a place where there was no sun. where there grew
no flowers. but every once in a while out of the darkness
something i loved would emerge and bring me to life again.
witnessing a starry sky. the lightness of laughing with old
friends. a reader who told me the poems had saved their life.
yet there i was struggling to save my own. my darlings.
living is difficult. it is difficult for everybody. and it is at that
moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized
hole. that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad
memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years.
cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world. there are
so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there
is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love.
with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that
roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply
important to accept that we are not the masters of this place.
we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like
a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after
us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our
own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the
seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always
on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is
breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
Sayfa 240Kitabı okudu
The alliance with Pakistan, sealed with a handshake by George W. Bush, is hardly an outlier. Take the impossible-to-satirize situation with a major organ of American foreign policy that enjoys longstanding, bi-partisan support: foreign aid. Where do $28-odd-billion go every year? To countries where many, many people view us as an “enemy.” The Pew Global Attitudes Survey queried more than 325,000 people in 60 countries that receive U.S. aid. It asked whether they saw America as more of a “partner,” or more of an “enemy” (or neither). The countries with the highest percentage of respondents who viewed us as an “enemy” were also among those receiv-ing significant amounts of U.S.-backed aid: the Palestinian territories (76 percent of respondents saw us as an “enemy”), Pakistan (64 percent), Turkey (49 percent), Lebanon (46 percent), Venezuela (39 percent).
So, yes, we are the world’s mightiest nation, but we serve as a global ATM for people hostile to us and our interests. We spend years chasing down Osama Bin Laden and fighting his minions in Afghanistan, while at the same time we support Pakistan’s jihadist-enabling regime. Look broadly and deeply at American foreign policy, and you will find it crowded with many more instances of the same depressing theme. When considered as a whole, American foreign policy does not add up to a whole. It is a bewildering mish-mash of diverging, inconsistent goals. It lacks a unifying, guiding principle.
Sayfa 170
The two circuits begin in the same place, but the desire circuit ends in a part of the brain that triggers excitement and enthusiasm, while the control circuit goes to the frontal lobes, a part of the brain that specializes in logical thinking.
In this way, both circuits give us the capacity to consider “phantoms”—things that don’t physically exist. For desire dopamine, those phantoms are things we wish to have but don’t have right now—things we want in the future. For control dopamine, the phantoms are the building blocks of imagination and creative thought: ideas, plans, theories, abstract concepts such as mathematics and beauty, and worlds yet to be.
Architecture does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy; it articulates the experience of our being-in the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self.
Sayfa 12 - The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire.
What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.
I'll show you that higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
