Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

"DNA isn't changeless. It struggles to remember itself, but it never remembers itself perfectly. Remembering a fish, it imagines a lizard. Remembering a horse, it imagines a hippopotamus. Remembering an ape, it imagines a man."

--Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock, p. 16
although if you told me that he was actually quoting someone else there, that would make sense, too

I'll have an actual review as soon as I finish, but in the meantime, here's another passage that I want to capture:

As I noted at the beginning of this book, we take rightness to be our steady state, while experiencing error as an isolated incident, no matter how many times it has happened to us. This might be a pragmatic choice--just a strategy for getting through the day with a minimum of hassle--but it is also emotionally alluring. Constantly reckoning with the possibility that we are wrong requires remaining aware of the chasm between us and the universe. It compels us to acknowledge that we can't know with certainty the truth about each other or the world, beyond the certainty that, in the deepest and most final sense, we are alone. That explains why we work so hard to dodge reminders of our fallibility, and why we weather so uneasily even our relatively trivial mistakes.

I've been holding off talking much about Being Wrong, the book by Kathryn Schulz that is rocking my world of late, but these words really struck me and I want to note and share them while I'm looking at the right page (246):

...as seen from the outside, denying error looks irrational, irresponsible, and ugly, while admitting it looks like courage, and like honor, and like grace...

Sometimes in life we won't know the answers and sometimes we will know them but not like them. Our minds, no matter how miraculous, are still limited. Our hearts, no matter how generous, can't always keep us from hurting other people. In other words, denial isn't just about refusing to accept the difficult, complicated, messy external world. Nor is acceptance just about accepting the facts. It is also, and most importantly, about accepting ourselves.

This quotation, pulled from jonathancarroll's post this morning deftly encapsulates one of the most heartbreaking and frustrating things for me:

“Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.”
--Grant Morrison.

Over in her blog, Jane Fonda shared this quotation:

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. --John W. Gardner

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
-~Winston Churchill

I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one
hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.
-E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)

The following is a passage from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin that frequently comes to mind when I think about, oh, a whole range of subjects. This time it was triggered by something that lifecollage posted, but when I found it, I realized that it was perhaps less relevant to her post than I originally thought and that I would like to have it in my journal, where I am more likely to be able to retrieve it the next time I want it.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the liuetenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains...and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked creates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.