Flight ways into the deep past and future

These are the flight ways into the deep past and future that are contained within the emergent becoming of a species. Generations stretching before and after, beyond the horizon of our temporal comprehension. It is all their work and their possibilities that are at stake in the living and dying albatross bodies that populate this blue planet at any given "now". And so it is under the shadow of all these generations, of a flight way taken – however impossibly – in its entirety, that we must feel the weight of an ethical claim to hold open space for the continuity of this ancient and evolving form of life.

 

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 39

A species must be understood as something like a line of movement

Central to the mode of thought that evolutionary theory opened up is the transition from an understanding of a species as a fixed and eternal "kind" to that of something more akin to a historical lineage stretched between a beginning (speciation) and an inevitable end (extinction). In this context, a species must be understood as something like a "line of movement" through evolutionary time. But it is much more than an empty trajectory. Each species lineage embodies a particular way of life, a particular set of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are passed between generations. But this is also not a static way of life. More than the sum of those individuals currently living, species are engaged in an ongoing intergenerational process of becoming – of adaptation and transformation – in which individual organisms are not so much "members" of a class or a kind, but "participants" in an ongoing and evolving way of life.

 

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 27

There's no sense or meaning in anything

I've long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay.

 

László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (Tuskar Rock Press, 2020) p. 228

Time were a frivolous interlude

He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity...

 

László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (Tuskar Rock Press, 2020) p. 4