Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
Ben Ehrenreich
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.”
“all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth.”
“Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call “civilization,” history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.”
“Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience.”
“How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.”
“(Benjamin again: “Gambling converts time into a narcotic.”)”
“unavoidable violence of writing and its origin as a tool for the maintenance of the repressive hierarchies of early states.”
“Yesterday’s panicked fears are today’s sober expectations.”
“Which is to say, the same things that will likely do us in: the greed and blindness of the few, the hungers of the many, a fatal inattention to the fragile web of life on which our existence here depends.”
“When I did start writing, all I wanted was to remember the owls. I wanted to pin them down like any other memory…I wanted to be able to read back and remember what it had felt like: the uncanny beauty of their flight, those late-autumn flowers, the violet light of dusk. But they didn’t let me. They wouldn’t stop flying…I kept following them because I was trying to understand not just time but writing, too, and I realized time and writing are inseparable. Writing extends us in time… In any case, I couldn’t have known, but there it is: somehow I knew, and I felt happy. Some part of me understood, and didn’t know how to tell the rest of me. Sometimes time moves like that, not straight but sideways, backward even, and, like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.”
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Book Keywords:
future, writing, posterity, apocalypse
