Dearest Father, 

You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, how to answer, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, partly because an explanation of my fear would require more details than I could even begin to make coherent in speech. And if I now try to answer in writing it will still be nowhere near complete, because even in writing my fear and its consequences raise a barrier between us and because the magnitude of material far exceeds my memory and my understanding.

(Franz Kafka)

 i read the everglades are on fire. 

 Gargoyles watch out for us while we forget. All these land grabs and developments have precedents and antecedents. We drink primordial water and breathe ancient air released from expiring glaciers. We think thoughts that come from deep time, that make us shy and cause our hearts to flutter, continuously attempting to express the ineffable. How did we get here, and where do we go?

 Thank you to all the fathers who stand up to the genocidal empire.

 ...the process of modernization expands to take in virtually the whole world, and the developing world culture of modernism achieves spectacular triumphs in art and thought. On the other hand, as the modern public expands, it shatters into a multitude of fragments, speaking incommensurable private languages; the idea of modernity, conceived in numerous fragmentary ways, loses much of its vividness, resonance and depth, and loses its capacity to organize and give meaning to people's lives. 

Marshall Berman

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

 ...they hardly know what has hit them. They grope, desperately but half blindly, for an adequate vocabulary; they have little or no sense of a modern public or community within which their trials and hopes can be shared.

Marshall Berman

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

 To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

Marshall Berman

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air