We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

“We seem to be forgetting what pragmatism and compromise and listening hard to the other point of view even feel like. Intransigence is confused with leadership. We seem increasingly in thrall to leaders who offer the seduction of unwavering solutions to complex and evolving problems. Activists on both sides of the political spectrum police allies and elected representatives for purity of thought and action, issuing anonymised threats to those who seek to express nuance or deviation.”

Childhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It lingers, crouching silently in our adult, then wizened bodies, until one day, many years later, when we think that the heavy burden of bitterness and despair we've been shouldering has turned us irredeemably into adults, it reappears with the force and speed of a lightning bolt, wounding us with its freshness, its innocence, its unerring dose of naivety, but most all with the certainty that this really and truly is the last glimpse we shall have of it.

I lost

“I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being whom I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing — nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.”