After-Orts #74
Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.
-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)
On Tyranny is an essential book. Here is the opening/summarizing paragraph of chapter 1:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
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Our Real Work by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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Meridian, Mississippi, has its own page in aviation history. The Key brothers, Fred and Al, set the world record for endurance flying in 1935 by circling the town in a Curtiss Robin for twenty-seven days without landing. . . . The past is made of stories that are unlikely to happen now, and Mississippi is made of stories that are unlikely to have happened in the first place . . . .
-- Ann Patchett, Flight Plan, in These Precious Days (2021)