Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.
(via theparisreview)
I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world.
Jeanette Winterson, Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 150
(via leopoldgursky)
(via awritersruminations)
Source: theparisreview.org
Dolphin Dreams
Gather around children. It’s time to tell you of our wonderful, terrible, tragic friends the humans. The ancient ones still speak of their clever ways, in fact it’s even rumored that they were nearly as intelligent as us. We’re told that they were strange in appearance as they had been forced to evolve most abnormally in order to accommodate their mysterious exodus from our share ancestral home. Sadly today they live only in our memories, and no one can say with any certainty what exactly became of these once noble creatures. We suspect that it may have been due to their insane fascination with recreating the powers of the universe. Perhaps a Thermonuclear Accident, or intentional mutual destruction. Their endless growth and expansionism might have even exhausted their seemingly infinite resources. It’s quite possible that they literally starved themselves into extinction. Let me now for a moment take you back into the distant past. I will speak of an age long before even the ever changing seasons marked the endless passage of time. As the two great civilizations of the day, it was agreed upon that they would dominion over the land and sky above the waters, and our beloved oceans would be ours to cherish and protect. Under this partnership our fragile and beautiful planet thrived and grew through countless millennia. Though it seemed destined to last forever, something changed in our dear friends. They grew steadily more selfish, uncaring, and even violent. They waged horrific wars against their own kind. Millions murdered for reasons beyond any rational comprehension. Their hearts could have been poisoned by greed. They may have even simply fallen asleep, the victims of a curse placed on them by their jealous warlike gods. Whatever the reason, their hearts grew cold, their thoughts and deeds ever more dangerous. In their uncaring manner, they destroyed the finite resources of the land and caused grievous harm to our ocean home as well. We were nearly forced to resort to violent confrontation with our once dearest friends. Thankfully sanity prevailed, as we realized that no one could possibly survive a war with such apocalyptic consequences. Though tragic, in the end they somehow destroyed themselves. Ironically the Earth may actually be all the better for this, yet they were once very dear to us and to the Earth herself. Despite their fatal flaws, they once were our noble and trusted friends. Children please learn from them. We should remember them and we should honor their memory, but we must never, never become like them.
(via mikefrawley:)
