Chris K – Cool to hear other people love this book! It feels like one of the most important books I’ve read in terms of learning how to work together at a critical time in history. I wish everyone could have the opportunity to read it.
Ian H – Good point, Cook probably would have had GPS. In which case I wonder if he’d have the same desire to explore…
obx hiker – I like your mom’s viewpoint here. Lopez is trying to hold both views at once, I think. In the chapter Talismans, he talks about a harpoon tip he carries in order to remember that we have to kill to eat and to support our families. An act, driven in part, by great love. “To act here is to face one’s own complicity,” he says, “to choose to take life in order that one’s own kin might continue to live.” And a second talisman he carries is a Spanish silver coin to remind him of the world of banality, greed, cruelty etc. These things remind him of the complexity of human existence while he writes. Of the overwhelm resulting in these complexities he writes: “Sometimes I’ve been able to rise to these ethical challenges and craft what I hope will be an eloquent objection. Other times, I am ashamed to admit, I step into the next room. I shut the door. Who can change this? I say to myself. The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.”
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