Hannah Arendt

The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

what is most diffcult is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. - Hannah Arendt They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. - Edgar Allen Poe

From BLM, I heard of James Baldwin. From the pandemic, I learnt Hannah Arenht. Both are writers. Baldwin left America for France because of racism in America. Arenht left Germany for America because of Nazism. Here, another name, Sophie Scholl, popped up. “The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” - James Baldwin ...

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.” ...