“I feel it in my work as a teacher, where I recognize that we are so close — so, so close — to a world where teaching looks like AI-generating lesson plans and delivering those lesson plans using AI-generated slides, and then assessing the skills of those lessons using AI-generated tests, and then grading those tests using a form of AI. The content of AI producing student work that is then fed back to AI for AI to assess. And for what? And at what cost? It pains me. It pains me deeply. And then I sit down and I read about clams. And it’s not just that I am reading about clams. It’s that I am reading the perspective of someone who thought that it was worth paying attention to clams. There. Remind me again why we read? I think that’s part of it. You pick up a book and someone has you by the arm. There, they are saying, look over there. They are pointing now. They are holding something in their hand. Little clam in the palm, refusing to open. Look at that thing that loves being alive, how it resists the same sun we turn our cheek towards. Crazy world, beautiful place. Down in the deep somewhere, a clam smaller than my hand is withstanding the pressure of a few dozen full-size trains just hanging out on top of its body.”

If so, then love is much more than love: love is something before love: it’s plankton struggling, and the great living neutrality struggling.

If i lived by the sea I would never be really sad. I get an immense sense of eternity and peace from the ocean. I can lose myself in staring at it hour after hour.