“Around 99.x% of what we pretend and treat as important has nothing to do with anything except the ways we have discovered, somehow, of distracting ourselves from the most obvious, human, and, indeed, miraculous natures of ourselves, our abilities, and nature.

We no longer understand such blatantly obvious features of reality as the sun — or night — and are not really members of the order of life on Earth so much as we have become usurpers of the possibility of living on Earth — even to ourselves.

Something has gone so badly wrong with our relationships with language, thought, and ideas that optimism has become ridiculous from any rational perspective. Yet, we persist in believing ourselves masters.

Although we are not without redeeming potentials, it has too long been true that the lion’s share of our mastery belongs to forms of ignorance whose peculiarly human characteristics deflect our every attempt to reveal or amend them.”

— an anonymous informant