## Metadata - Author: [[David Abram]] - Full Title: Becoming Animal - Category: #books ## Highlights - Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E8AIK2&location=186)) - Whether sounded on the tongue, printed on the page, or shimmering on the screen, language’s primary gift is not to re-present the world around us, but to call ourselves into the vital presence of that world—and into deep and attentive presence with one another. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E8AIK2&location=235)) - I’m suddenly struck by the immense exertion it would take to hold myself in such a stable posture, moment after moment, without flinching. To sustain itself in that position, steadily, so that even now it is still bearing that very shape, and still again, and yet again, hour after hour, and day after day—that must take a lot of effort! Not, of course, that the rock has to deal with the kind of mad restlessness that besets a muscled being like myself. Yet simply to hold itself together in a cosmos that is steadily flying apart, to prevail, year after year, against the suck of entropy, seems already to entail a kind of stubbornness, an obdurate persistence that we miss when we think of “being,” or bare existence, as a purely passive state. And so I find myself staring at this rock with a new astonishment—a new appreciation for its compacted energy, the wild activity that it displays by its simple presence. ([Location 790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E8AIK2&location=790))