Welcome to Litsy!

I keep talking about dyeing because of the course I‘m taking, and people keep thinking I mean dying. Well, this lovely book really is about death. Robert Bringhurst writes about how we might come to terms with the foreseeable end of humans as a species. Jan Zwicky uses Socrates as an example of how to face individual mortality with fortitude and humility. Two wise and thoughtful essays in under 100 pages.

Only the wild can calibrate your mind, because it‘s what your mind was born from. If you‘re trapped in the city, you find a little smidgen or reminder of the wild—a mouse in a cupboard, a sparrow in a maple tree, or a bumblebee in the lilac—and then your mind remembers what it is.

Those of us who care about the earth, and who keep recalibrating our minds by spending time in the wild, find ourselves siding, more and more, with marginal cultures —old, sustainable cultures—against the unsustainable mainstream, and with other species against our own. In present conditions, thinking like an ecosystem will tip you more and more into cultural and biological disobedience, not just civil disobedience.

Three short philosophical essays about how people should live amidst climate catastrophe and the coming extinction. Their answers are steeped in classical philosophy and regard what it means to be a good person (the ultimate question of philosophy) in any age. For those of a philosophical bent, this book has a lot to offer.