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afdb673
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billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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528e4a9
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There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9ec5ea3
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That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word 'lost' comes from the old Norse 'los' meaning the disbanding of an army...I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article..
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play
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2430f3e
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Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on..
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violence-against-women
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e4376f4
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There's no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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70057ca
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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
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pain
healing
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Rebecca Solnit |
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08be799
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Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4a3cc1a
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Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5e08ab3
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Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women's bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women's rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman. Most women and girls limit t..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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dade442
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What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.
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narration
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fd74575
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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3e483ad
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The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1cc6796
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Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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32725ec
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Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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daf5459
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Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
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landscape
place
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f5dfdb9
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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bb55bca
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5908241
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We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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89312f3
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They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
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nature
page-188
extinction
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4b4bfa3
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The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
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feminism
writing
tell-your-own-story
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5eaaf74
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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75ff830
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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 act of insurrection.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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af9c776
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Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tale..
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transformation
folk-tales
hans-christian-andersen
swans
the-wild-swans
stories
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Rebecca Solnit |
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172da65
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If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
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gold
water
values
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b66f94f
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Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fa695da
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The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0913af8
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At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
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subjugation
modern-society
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6dddf56
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Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn't an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fd1d514
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Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use...time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space -- for wilderness and public space -- must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7e0151b
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Reading these stories, it's tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f2c1011
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Home is everything you can walk to.
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walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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efc6d36
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People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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994e7a0
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The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between...Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued-that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering..
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modern-life
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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dc80995
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There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he t..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e57988c
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The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel "Regeneration," Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half cater..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a8053dd
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The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, ca..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0d365db
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Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
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page-250
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9827d88
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Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the "war on terror.")"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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09f307e
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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page-90
gardening
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Rebecca Solnit |
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59d39e0
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The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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294fa04
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Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
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thinking
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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07e5c30
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Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
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hope
possible
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f52b302
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But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch--even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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acd40c5
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Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, "from the faraway nearby." It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world."
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Rebecca Solnit |