Orts #950
behold the quokka!
https://bit.ly/2m0fbhm
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
-- the four quotes are all from Susan Sontag
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In a forest that has been left to its own devices, the genetic makeup of each individual tree belonging to the same species is very different. This is in contrast to people, who are genetically very similar. In evolutionary terms, you could say we are all related. In contrast, the individual beeches growing in a stand near where I live are as far apart genetically as different species of animals. This means each tree has different characteristics. Some deal better with drought than cold. Others have powerful defenses against insects. And yet others are perhaps particularly impervious to wet feet . . . .
-- Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees