Wool
Highlights
Everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. Or in pleasant company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise of the crowd.
She realized, suddenly, that part of the reason she wanted this woman as her sheriff was that she felt unattainable.
“The days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don’t they? That decision not to visit. The first few days slide by easy enough; anger and youth power them along. But then they pile up like unrecycled trash. Isn’t that right?”
Juliette wanted to tell him that he hadn’t been alive a long time but remembered what it had felt like as a shadow when people dismissed her the same way.
“People want continuity. They want to know tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday.”
Is the world beyond a good place or not? Is it safe or is it dangerous? Beyond the horizon, are there more wonders or more terrors? These questions haunt us, whether we’re aware of them or not. They determine whether we love to travel to foreign lands, or if we feel better staying home. They influence how we feel about immigration, how we feel about other countries, other states, even other neighborhoods. Some of us dread the future, while for others it can’t get here soon enough. Some people long for the days of the past, while others see nothing but progress.
The wallscreens are our televisions, our web browsers, our search engines, our newspapers, the local news, our cellphones. We are bombarded constantly by talking heads telling us what the world is like. They say it’s mostly car wrecks, traffic jams, murders, war, hurricanes, and things that might kill your children, which we’ll tell you about at eleven.
We are captivated by the awful. We want to know if it’s something we should be concerned about. It makes perfect sense: we are descendants of a million generations of humans, apes, shrews, and lizards who were better safe than sorry. In nature, optimists taste great.
I’m not always as brave as I’d like to be. I falter and fail and give in to the screens in my life. And yet, sailing across vast oceans and into ports unknown taught me something vital: there is nothing out there as dark as our doubts, nor as dangerous as our inaction. Go out. See for yourselves. And if what you find there is broken, know that together we can fix it.
So key to my passion around connecting people and getting people out into the world (i.e. Solstice).
We have an even stronger bias toward the time we live in. Part of this is egocentrism, but it’s mostly that we know far more about present events than we do a past that we barely study. The pace of innovation, for instance, feels like it’s moving at its swiftest pace ever, but there is a good argument to be made that the world was changing more rapidly a century ago than it is today. Cries of record partisanship and nastiness in politics ignore the fact that politicians once shot each other in the streets and had fist fights in Congress. Every generation thinks it lives in unique times. This bias is almost always wrong.
Throughout human history, we have told stories as much for warning as for entertainment. Don’t stray too far from safety because bad things might happen. An expression of our internal fears and external exhortations, the disaster story became a fixture. There is reason to suspect that the origin of storytelling lies here. Our lives have always felt tenuous.
If we’re always been obsessed with wilderness and survival stories, why have we moved on to world-ending tales and post-apocalyptic fiction? I believe it’s because we no longer have a wilderness on Earth to explore and fear… …These days, when we want to tell a wilderness story, we have to look beyond horizons of distance and think about horizons of time. We need to imagine a future where we might be exploring other worlds, or a future where our world returns to the wilderness that we fear.
The Odyssey tells a story of the wilderness, the sea, wrathful gods, all our physical and emotional worlds ending, and how our hero can somehow survive and prevail in the end. It’s a story as old as time. The reason this story resonates with us today, even though it was written millennia ago and was told in a different language by people from a different culture, is because no era and no people are all that unique. Which is a marvelous thing.