Ben Ehrenreich QUOTES

1 " Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

2 " Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

3 " How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own
labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

4 " We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

5 " [T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

6 " Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

7 " Only once did I make Shireen sit down with me for a formal interview. She talked about the need to rebuild what she called "the culture of resistance" that she remembered experiencing during the Second Intifada, but which had since evaporated, replaced by a dull consumerist individualism, by "this illusion that if I forget about Palestine, build a career, take a loan, buy a car, build a house, watch Arab Idol on TV, it's all be okay; that if they're not raiding *your* house, you're okay." In a culture constructed around a shared goal of liberation, she said, "my house is your house and your son is my son and if they kill me today they will kill you tomorrow." (103) "

― Ben Ehrenreich , The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

8 " all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

9 " Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

10 " Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call “civilization,” history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

11 " (Benjamin again: “Gambling converts time into a narcotic.”) "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

12 " Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

13 " It’s a lot to take in at once, this web, and in our dizziness and fear that its limitlessness adds up to meaninglessness we can’t help but hack a story out of it, following a single path from node to node and ignoring and excluding all the other links. That’s what we do. That’s what I’ve done…And that beyond any individual route or routes, there is the map itself, this sprawling connectedness without terminus or border. It tells a different kind of story, and presents a different kind of choice. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

14 " Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another…The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing? "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

15 " To know where the stars are is to know what time it is, what day and what year. Time is not an independent vector that pushes on, stubborn and cocksure, taking us to a place called the future. It lives in our bodies and in the stars, in the mountains that rise up from the sea floors, in the wind and rain that wash the mountains back into the sea. Everything moves. Mountains and oceans as well as stars. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

16 " I had almost forgotten about the bougainvillea, how bright they are, explosions of pink climbing the stucco walls, and how soft the light is in the afternoon, how it makes the colors seem magically deeper and it really does feel like anything is possible. For a long time, that light was enough to sustain me there. [in Los Angeles] "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

17 " For the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the stars that crossed the sky each night were not just distant lights of fixed path and varying brilliance. They were letters, words, writing, a script that could be read. Babylonian inscriptions from the first millennium B.C. referred to the star-filled sky as “the heavenly writing.” Astronomical observation—the tracking of the paths of the stars and planets and the prediction of celestial events—was not an abstract science but a form of reading, an attempt to transcribe and interpret the scribblings of the gods. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

18 " The anthropologist’s arrival caused the break-up of the group that he was studying. Lévi-Strauss did not reflect on this, nor on the fact that his own text too was written, and was itself part of a long line, dating back to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and to Columbus himself, of European writings about indigenous Americans that were at every step accompanied by conquest and destruction—“leaving descriptions of what we wipe out,” per Ursula K. Le Guin. If his presence, and his writing, caused harm to his ostensible subjects, Lévi-Strauss did not wish to dwell on it. Better to highlight the violence of all writing, shrug, and move on.

One of the things I am trying to do here is not ever shrug. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

19 " Las Vegas might be easier to take if I understood it not as a city but as a dream the desert is dreaming about itself. I found the thought reassuring even if it means, as it must, that I am a part of the dream too, and it will soon transmute into another dream, as dreams always do, and then disappear and fade quickly from the recollections of the dreamer, whoever that may be. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

20 " Eliade argued that until the arrival of the Hebrew prophets, time was universally understood as cyclical, and was bound through ritual to the sacred. Regularly recurring religious ceremonies enacted, and reenacted, the creation of the cosmos, allowing their participants to play a direct role in the “regeneration of the world,” “projecting” themselves into “mythical time.” Only after the prophets, for Eliade, did history enter the picture. "

― Ben Ehrenreich , Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time