#on freedom

[emilianadarling]

- Timothy Snyder. The first and perhaps most important lesson from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017)

Snyder's new book, On Freedom, was published in 2024.

[metamorphesque]

"Freedom", Paul Éluard (translated by Ben Platts-Mills)

[kimiko24]

Let's run away together, towards a life where we can be free

[antigonick]

For this reason, Michel Foucault's distinction between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing) has been key for me, as when he writes, "Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom." (...) This is Brown's point when she says that freedom to self-govern "requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents."

—Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

[blasphemister]

Largely centered, to little surprise, on Donald Trump and how the former president has put America on a glide path to fascism. “We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things (like “government”) being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this,” he writes. “Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.”

[1-jar-of-stars]

Untitled 001.

Seeing a hallway friend in public is such an excruciating experience

Yes, we said hi to each other every day. No, I didn’t know your name until one of my friends asked how I knew you. Yes, I took off in the middle of the year and you never saw me again. No, i didn’t die. I am So happy that you lived. There’s a part of my heart that beats for you. I don’t even know you. I’m so happy to see you. We were never friends so we have nothing to catch up on. Yes, i missed you. Yes, i thought about you. You look happier. I look happier. Long time no see. I hope i never see you again.

Have a great life. i love you. i don’t know you enough to mean that. goodbye.

[fishingforwords]

the higher you go the freer you are.

mary barnyard, height is the distance down || t.s. eliot, the waste land || parkour || roman payne, rooftop soliloquy || charles bukowski || pascale petit, sky ladder || tony hoagland, from this height || mary oliver, every day has something in whose name is forever

[maaarine]

On Freedom (Timothy Snyder, 2024)

"Politicians of inevitability and their acolytes like to talk about averages, but they are worse than meaningless.

If Jeff Bezos is in a room with a hundred impoverished working mothers, their average wealth is north of $1 billion, but that means nothing to the women.

If you have $12 million, and each of your ten friends has $100,000 in college debt, you and friends are, on average, $1 million in the black.

But your friends can’t pay off their debts with that average.

It only seems that the typical American has some money because the wealth of a few hundred families—again, a group the size of my high school class—gets into the mix and spoils the math.

Since half the national wealth is owned by an irrelevantly small group of people, the country is only half as wealthy as the numbers present it to be.

If we remove oligarchs from the sample, it becomes brutally clear that the national wealth is spread thin.

Typical Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, which is a polite way of saying that they are poor.

A typical American cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency. A typical American cannot pay for the funeral that negative freedom hastens.

Matters are still worse than this. It is not enough to remove the wealth of those top few hundred families in order to correct the math of national freedom.

We actually have to count that wealth against the national welfare, because its concentration leads to practices and policies that leave almost everyone less mobile and less free.

The tiny group of “have yachts” are more politically coherent and powerful than the enormous mass of “have-nots,” and they will act to keep it that way."

[cinematic-literature]

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) by Nicole Holofcener

Book title

To Paradise (2022) by Hanya Yanagihara

I Had to Tell It by Beth Mitchell

A Swim In The Pond In The Rain (2021) by George Saunders

Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) by Marlon James

On Freedom - Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021) by Maggie Nelson

[othellho]

Forest Sounds: A Conversation with Carl Phillips

[lazyydaisyyy]

Making art won't feel like reparative labor, it will feel like sanding aluminum for eight hours and breathing in toxic dust, wondering why you're not hanging out with your family or binge watching Netflix or visiting your sick mother or performing labor guaranteed to pay instead of cost. It will feel, and perhaps it will be, indefensible, despite your developed ability to claim aluminum sanding as a blueprint for a utopian future.

Maggie Nelson, On Freedom

[agirlnamedbone]

Duffie Taylor (South, 2019)

[metamorphesque]

there is a moment between jumping from the frying pan into the fire that feels a lot like liberation

[kimiko24]

I'll love you; we'll love each other, we'll save one another

[antigonick]

The whole point of reparative reading is that people derive sustenance in mysterious, creative, and unforeseeable ways from work not necessarily designed to give it, and that the transmission is nontransferable and ungovernable; the whole point of reparative making is that it is reparative for the maker, which guarantees nothing in particular about its effect on the reader.

—Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint