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At that age I had a certain vision of the world, this very tidy, control-freak, Khalil Gibran–reading idea of nobility, like the way to be a good person was to hover righteously above all those weak, dopey sinners down there. Sort of a purity obsession. To go out in the Chicken Van every night was to constantly have that view undercut. Because the whole world was crazy and erratic and sinful. But the people I met were also sweet and weird and endearing. You’d get all of that in one night.
George Saunders, the Art of Fiction No. 245
theparisreview.org
A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover.
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
The Roman poet Terence wrote a line that was once famous: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—and I think this strikes precisely the right note. Terence doesn’t say that everything human is fully accessible to him, that there are no relevant divides of race or class or sexual orientation or religion; he doesn’t say that everyone else is instantly or fully comprehensible to him. He says, rather, than nothing human is alien to him: nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.
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