Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a stirring, nearly-flawless novel that breathes new life into the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. When a hyper-aggressive strain of the flu kills more than 99 percent of the world’s population, Earth’s few survivors must decide how to live in a crumbling world. It’s a typical setup for this […]
Thoreau’s Walden is a masterpiece of transcendentalist philosophy that has inspired many generations of Americans. It’s also a text ripe for revival. My generation is trying to balance our dependence on modern technology with our love of the quickly-vanishing natural world. Too often it feels like we are caught in a zero-sum game pitting modernity […]
“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; […]
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,––that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from […]
“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all […]
“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what […]
“Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attack’d by reason, and at the same time reason is so clear in the point, that there is no possibility of disguising her. Not being able to reconcile these two enemies, we endeavor to set ourselves at ease as much as possible, by successively […]
“He had never imagined anything here could be as beautiful as that shattered red horizon and the purple and ochre cliffs. Beyond the landing field where the night’s faint dew had touched life into the hurried seeds of Arrakis, he saw great puddles of red blooms and, running through them, an articulate tread of violet…like […]
“The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up […]
“What’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the ‘natural’ had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces […]