[오늘의 한문장] Hope In The Dark : Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society. - P26

때는 1617년, 이 수학자의 이름은 요하네스 케플러...

때는 1617년, 이 수학자의 이름은 요하네스 케플러Johannes Kepler이다. 아마도 세계에서 가장 불행한 남자인 동시에 역사상 가장 위대한 과학자일 것이다. 케플러는 자연보다 신이 더욱 세력을 떨치는 세계, 중력보다 악마의 존재가 더 가까운 세계에서 살고 있다. - <진리의 발견>, 마리아 포포바 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/3b64318ec85b4de2 - P26

케플러의 인생은 과학이 현실을 변화시키는 과정을 보여주는 증거라 할 수 있다. 이는 "테세우스Theseus의 배"라고 알려진 플루타르코스Plutarchos의 사고실험 속 자아의 변화와 같은 과정을 거친다. - <진리의 발견>, 마리아 포포바 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/3b64318ec85b4de2 - P28

인간의 정신이 외부로 시선을 돌려 자연을 이해하고 내면으로 시선을 돌려 기존의 사실에 의문을 품는다면 그 하나하나의 변혁이 쌓이면서 지평선 자체가 변화한다. - <진리의 발견>, 마리아 포포바 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/3b64318ec85b4de2 - P30

Inside the word emergency is ...

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters. - P13

Direct action is indirectly powerful: now the media scrutinizes those corporations as never before, and their names are widely known. - P16

A gift for embracing paradox is not the least of the equipment an activist should have. - P17

Those tens of millions worldwide constituted something unprecedented, one of the ruptures that have ushered in a new era. They are one reason to hope for the future. - P17

In his book The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch declares, "Fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor" and speaks of "informed discontent which belongs to hope, because they both arise out of the No to deprivation." - P19

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed. - P21

Hope, Ernst Bloch adds, is in love with success rather than failure, and I’m not sure that’s true of a lot of the most audible elements of the left. - P22

Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one’s own virtue rather than the realization of results. - P22

The bleakness of the world is required as contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above. - P23

The outcome is usually uncertain, but for some reason tales of decline and fall have an authority that hopeful ones don’t. - P23

But beyond that is an entirely different sort of hope: that you possess the power to change the world to some degree or just that the world is going to change again, and uncertainty and instability thereby become grounds for hope. - P23

To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal, - P23

Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side. - P24

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection. - P24

Arundhati Roy said, ˝For many...

Arundhati Roy said, "For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream politics, there are rare, ephemeral moments of celebration." - P10

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." - P11

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. - P11

Overcoming alienation and isolation or their causes is a political goal for the rest of us. - P12

"Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. And hopelessness can turn into tragic despair. Hence the need for a kind of education in hope." - P12

Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. - P12

All of it—the rings of Saturn...

All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the sheen on the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality—it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. - P120