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
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
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