Reading has been a key continuity in the flow of my life, a primary focus since I was a child enthusiastically bringing home armloads of library books each week.
Appetizer:
This is the first printed illustration of a rhombicuboctahedron, based on an original drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. It is in the book De Divina Proportione by geometer Luca Pacioli, which was created in 1509.
Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
Well narrated by the authors
A really good deep-dive into the causes of the current rise of what the authors call end times fascism—messianic dreams, the greedy delusions of the big tech bros, and for-profit prepperism—as well as the forms of resistance to this ugly fascism that have been and can be successful at creating a better world for all of us.
Most people have the capacity for awe, to gasp at the jeweled beauty of a songbird or the otherworldliness of a whale's exhalation or the intricate latticework of an ancient holy site. Children have the capacity for pure awe; so do ninety-year-old actors in space. To experience awe is to dissolve into the swirl of the universe, to feel small in the best way. This sense of connection is also why we grieve when we witness strangers suffering, and feel the great sorrow of extinction. The fact that this capacity seems to be missing from the men who hold our collective fate in their hands is a personal loss for them—and an existential crisis for the rest of us.
The inability to appreciate this planet and its marvelous cast of characters helps explain why they are so prepared to sacrifice it. Indeed, the tech right's willingness to eliminate our life-sustaining labor and replace human relationships with synthetic ones cannot be separated from their indifference to what little remains of the planet's fast-vanishing wildlife and plant diversity. They don't know how to love this place, to savor the pleasure of other people's company, or to marvel at the mysteries presented by other species.
In short, we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. There is something treasonous in this. Treasonous not to an abstraction like a flag or a nation, for we are not nationalists. But treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us.
They are traitors to creation, to the wonders of here.
This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world.
…
Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
In End Times Fascism, Klein and Taylor raise Walter Benjamin's concept "jetztzeit", literally "now time", a moment so pregnant with the spirit, the urgency of revolution that it marshals the energy of all movements that went before it. Again, it's poetic, but it's also literal, observable. If we want to oppose this new fascist strain, we really have to get a move on. "I don't tend to use this language, I try to be measured, but I think I've earned the right to escalate," she says. "The moment we're in, people are really mad and however mad you are, it's not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They're traitors to creation."
Klein doesn't want for reasons to fight. "I've made a choice to live very close to nature in a pretty wild part of British Columbia," she says. "On a dark night, it's a blanket of stars. And now we see so many of what I call Elon's space bugs [Starlink satellites] just crawling through the sky. He wants to increase that a hundredfold. Who said he could? Who gave him that right? That's a place where I find my anger. I get really angry about the stars. I get really angry about the orcas. I get really angry about Gaza. Other people will find their anger somewhere else. We have to find our places of deepest love and fight like hell."
Well narrated by the authors