In the dark time, to act is more important than to hope.
Samantha Rose Hill once wrote that “for Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act.”
Life is always about hope.
Then in an interview, Saidiya Hartman said the follows about the advice of “Don’t despair.” Here is the excerpt: “What is joy? What is joy? I tend to describe joy as this experience of transformation or release from the constraint or costume of the individual or the subject into this other form. So, for me I think it’s about floating, it’s about being nothing and being everything at the same time; this sense of the self disappearing in the context of the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land. That kind of joy is always about self-dissolution, escape. And my favourite colour? My garden in full bloom. I’m a gardener, so I love the colours in my garden and I love just playing with colours. I’ll show you my dahlias (shows image on phone), these are from my garden. Deep purples, deep burgundies towards black. The garden’s blackest flowers. And finally, I don’t know if I would have a question or advice, but probably the advice that I would give myself would be something like ‘don’t despair’. Don’t despair.”
Obessession to know more and deeper, the details, the history
John Carmack’s commencement speeck in 2020 is great.
Books
the long shadow fo default, Britain’s unpaid war debts to the US, 1917-2020 by David James Gill. 2023
Why the new deal matters, by Eric Rauchway, 2021