Given Heed Already to a Great Many Things

Whoever follows traces must not only pay attention; above all, he must have given heed already to a great many things. (The hunter must know about the hoof of the animal whose trail he is on; he must know the hour when that animal goes to drink; he must know the course of the river to which it turns, and the location of the ford by which he himself can get across.) In this way there comes into play the peculiar configuration by dint of which long experience appears translated into the language of immediate experience. Experiences can, in fact, prove invaluable to one who follows a trace—but experiences of a particular sort. The hunt is the one type of work in which they function intrinsically. And the hunt is, as work, very primitive.

The experiences <Erfohrungen> of one who attends to a trace result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. They have no sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study.

Walter Benjamin
from The Arcades Project, Convolue m, Idleness

What is Still Unknown Yet Already Exists

How can one care for something that one can only think of controlling and exploiting? Feeling separate from nature leads to this interaction, which is so negative and devastating. In some fields of science-and among certain scientists—there's a strong inclination to impose one's will on and control over what's being studied. Some scientific methods are wonderful, but everything we perceive depends on our capacity to listen, relate to others, feel and see the network, and intuit what is still unknown yet already exists.

Delcy Morelos
from a conversation with Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, here.

And That Has To Be Enough

I don’t think that people on our side have any right to assume a good outcome. I think that the real, authentic motive for doing what we’re doing is because it’s right. And that has to be enough. If we have to have some guarantee that it’s going to be effective, sooner or later, we’ll become discouraged and quit.

Wendell Berry
from an interview concerning protests

We Possess No Other Life

It would be futile to turn away from the past and think only about the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that there is even a possibility. The opposition between the past and the future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; It is we who, in order to build it, must give it everything, give it our life itself. To give we must possess, and we possess no other life, no other sap, than the treasures inherited from the past and digested, assimilated, recreated by us. Of all the needs of the human soul, there is none more vital than the past.

Simone Weil
from L'enracinement

No Longer a Place But a Condition

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a decentralised urban landscape emerged in which the differences between centre and periphery, city and country and culture and nature are no longer clearly defined. The city no longer seems a place but rather a condition. According to the Italian urban planner Stefano Boeri, “the city has exported its genetic code”. Furthermore, since an urban culture has also settled in rural areas, nature has become, to a large extent, an urban artefact. City, suburb, countryside and nature are all touched by human management. All have become cultural landscapes. The contemporary city no longer stands opposed to nature, but encloses large parts of it. 

Steven Jacobs
from The Photoresque: Images Between City and Countryside