Week Links: 5/17/26
Today’s links will be slightly abbreviated, because I am recommending some very difficult things.
But first, congrats to the grads:
I am finally getting around to reading Vollmann’s No Immediate Danger, vol. 1 of his Carbon Ideologies. A passage from the intro:
My sister is forced to go into private practice now that the amazing Women’s Emotional Wellness Center is being shuttered. This made me return to a work we both value, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. A passage that might be valued by many now:
The most important step in learning concentration is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking or drinking. Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself—and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 112
The difficult, long reading I recommend this week is Francesca Albanese’s report on torture and genocide in the occupied territories. Both your courage and your intellect are required, along with your heart, to confront the American-sponsored genocide that is still underway:
A poem, for these times, from Geoffrey Hill:
