ekla

Mungo’s capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn’t selflessness; he simply could not help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced so much. So that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one tended.

because they all love and hate each other to varying degrees like patrick loves tennis and tashi and art but art the most and art loves tennis and patrick but he loves tashi the most and tashi loves tennis the most but none of them can have the thing they want most so they use one another to get closer to it and in the aftermath end up resenting each other for what could have been

amy and danny spend the majority of the season trying to get enough money to step back and just be with their families. amy in particular is trying to get back to her daughter, back into the space and time when she was with her after her birth and at peace— something was finally hers alone and then she gets it after a lot of bullshit posturing and jumping through hoops and it’s unfulfilling anyway because her daughter grew up and is becoming her own person and even then after years of working away from her, she’s more so her husbands than hers. they can never be alone like that again. she gets everything but it’s still not what she wants. it’s material— another facade to put up and showcase for everybody else. what she really wants is companionship, a relationship without exchange. no give and take, push or pull. she wants to be unashamed and free and i love that she and danny get stranded out in nature together where they can let go of everything after it all goes to shit. they’re like adam and eve, except without the guilt and before all the sins and without religion. they’re an adam and eve that were just HUMAN. neanderthals. no god/society punishing them or judging them. like. they concerns are for the basics. food and water. no bullshit plant store. no bullshit deal. no bullshit messy relationships or family or expectations. THEY GET TO LIVE. AND THEY GET TO RECOGNIZE SOMETHING SO HUMAN IN EACH OTHER. THE PIT IS LONELINESS IN A WORLD WHERE YOU ARE SURROUNDED AND WATCHED BY PEOPLE 24/7. THATS WHAT SHES TALKING ABOUT THE ENTIRE SERIES. EMPTY BUT SOLID. EMPTY BUT SOLID. EMPTY BUT SOLID. in the end they’re not spouses or siblings or neighbors or business partners or enemies or even friends. they just are. and that’s all they wanted. Oh my god.

“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”

I was reading an interesting article years ago about collective memory. There have been a lot of thinkpieces over the years about how humans are getting lazier and worse at remembering things thanks to technology. There’s a tendency, particularly in the western world, to behave as if memorization was all people did prior to the internet. 

My maternal grandfather was a math professor at the City University of New York. He died before I was born, but he passed a key bit of wisdom to my mother, and she passed it on to me:

“See him face”