John Ruskin: Study of an oak leaf. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
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Recipes for hot possets from Mrs. Beeton's Family Cookery.
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Lacework by Dagobert Peche.
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Berlin Iron jewelry was first fabricated in the early 1800's when the Prussian royal family asked its citizens to help fund their country's share of the war effort against Napoleon by exchanging their gold and silver jewelry for iron. Production was later carried on through the Victorian era and the black finish of the iron (done by treating with linseed oil) worked both for mourning and to establish one's patriotism.
The anchor symbolized hope.
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Poem by Anna Akhmatova
Poem by Anna Akhmatova
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A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind.
Wallace Shawn, "Developments Since My Birth." The New York Review of Books, 10/27/2020.
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People have had four years now to find out just how truly terrible Mr. Trump is. ... The numbers as of Sunday revealed that more than 71 million people voted for him anyway—eight million more than voted for him in 2016.
Magaret Renkl, "71 Million People Voted for Trump. They're Not Going Anywhere." The NYT, 11/9/2020.
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Roxane Gay: "This is America. This is not an aberration. This is indeed our country and who the proverbial 'we' are."*
And so the chaos of a country becomes the chaos within its families and communities. People spar over their assumptions and hastily made decisions based on half-understandings of scientific evidence. They’re forced to conduct their own awkward, fraught behavioral micro-negotiations before visiting relatives, celebrating a birthday, or going out for a beer on a bar’s patio. Americans have no common conception of the pandemic, which means you can’t assume that someone you’ve trusted for years isn’t about to expose you to a deadly disease, or even that you live on the same plane of reality.
Amanda Mull, "The Difference Between Feeling Safe and Being Safe." The Atlantic, 10/26/2020.
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Some might think that breaking barriers means you start off on one side of the barrier, and then you just turn up on the other side of the barrier. No, there’s breaking involved. When you break things, it’s painful. You get hurt. You may get cut, and you may bleed. It will be worth it, but it is not without pain.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, quoted by Jemele Hill in The Atlantic.
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“What this show teaches me,” I told my husband midway through the first episode, “is that anyone can start a cult.”*
Someone did a study of poets, and most of them who are doing well now went to good universities and grew up with money—inherited money. But no one would dare have a conversation about that. White, white. Whiteness now has the pallor of cowardice. That whiteness quotient was hard to miss. Good fortune is the subject of fiction over centuries, and its connection to a culture—look at Dickens. By culture I mean production, the gathering of people around a central value, to produce it more efficiently and safely. Privilege is the guarantee of blindness to your own conformism.
Fanny Howe, interviewed by Fiona Alison Duncan for The White Review, October 2020.
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I asked them, as a closing activity, to go home and create toolboxes with found objects that represented the tools of transitional justice. And it should just have meaning to them. So they all come back. And they included things like a mirror, because you have to look at yourself; like a candle, because you have to have hope; like a flashlight so that you can see your way; like a book, because you need knowledge; a journal, because you need to reflect, and you also need to write history.
But one of the things that was so moving to me is, to a person, they included an adhesive tape, glue, sewing kit. And it was because if we do this work we need to do, we will sever our relationship. And so we had to talk about the fact that how much of a relationship is it, if there’s no trust, if you don’t have a shared past, if you don’t have a shared future?
Karen Murphy, in conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being.
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