Sublime

Whether or not I personally keep up with everything happening everywhere all the time, I know it exists; that awareness alone is fatiguing. It’s very easy to succumb to fatalism, perhaps the logical extension of compassion fatigue—believing we’re “fucked” no matter what we do is mysteriously tempting.

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we ne

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

If neurasthenic sensitivity was the hallmark of nineteenth-century invalidism, a kind of hyperpersonalized concern with wellness is the hallmark of twenty-first-century invalidism—a quality that lets the rest of us dismiss the invalid as fussy or oversensitive while we get back to our frenetic, endlessly connected, productive lives.

I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than community, must do all the healing.