## Metadata - Author: [[Lydia Millet]] - Full Title: We Loved It All - Category: #books ## Highlights - As the parent shrinks, the child grows larger and more powerful. And when a certain parity is reached—a parity agreed upon by social convention and physical age, often between eighteen and twenty-one—the child is set free. So the task of any parent is paradoxical: a devotional intimacy aimed at inevitable separation. A long, dedicated service of gifting and appeasement, care and adoration that’s bound to end in the absence of its idol. ([Location 87](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=87)) - the term endling came, in the 1990s, to refer to an animal that is the last one of its kind. ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=208)) - the grand permission we’ve given ourselves to use the bodies of other animals. ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=282)) - Happiness is a wavering mirage that shimmers on the horizon, a promise of sudden deliverance that supports the passive attendance of our lives. Invites us to wait, wait, wait, for the perfect to manifest itself. Descending like an angel from the clouds. What we actually need may be something less vague and more attainable: an embrace of the real over a constantly deferred ideal, an engagement with the precious and finite time that’s given us. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=313)) - Lifelines that guide us through the diffuse fog of existing, stories make sense of the complex and shifting miasma of perception. They’re how the human brain organizes sensory data into consciousness, time and events into coherence. Personhood is built out of narrative units, without which the divisions between self and not-self would tend to dissolve. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=378)) - Jesus was a god, healing the sick, feeding the many from little, and raising a widow’s son from the dead. Like the prophet Elisha in the Torah. He walked on water but perished like a man, flanked by the humblest of sinners. Suffered and rose and rose again, brimming with the divinity latent in all people and shining down through the centuries as a gift to the faithful. The narrative of one who suffers for many is dear to us. And told more widely than any other single story. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=420)) - the story of one man’s sacrifice for all is a tale from the land of opposites—a stark symbolic reversal of social reality. Since in almost all the orders established by our kind, the many have suffered for the few. ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=453)) - In faith, including the one Jesus inspired, the self is called upon to subsume itself into the whole. But without a community of faith, that drive toward the greater good recedes. And stories bend themselves toward the glory of a single person. Without the practice of submission to a divine other—who represents, ideally, a commitment to social duty and a common moral scheme—the collective fades into a distant feature of the landscape. Without a call to prayer, maybe that glorification of the individual hero becomes a faith of its own. ([Location 466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=466)) - Most great cities are far more vulnerable to the uncontainment of nature than we like to believe. New York, as the journalist Alan Weisman pointed out in a 2007 book called The World Without Us, is built atop rushing subterranean rivers and would be swamped in days if its pumps were abandoned. ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=554)) - Time is a series of compartments too, more and more precisely standardized and globalized over the course of modern history. The monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly increments of forward movement are a structure of temporal confinement, regimenting our daily behavior with such conceptual hardness that even our mental picture of time takes the shape of a grid. Our visual representation of this, the squares or rectangles arranged on our calendars in straight lines, has displaced more fluid and circular notions of seasonality. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=559)) - Echidnas have a lower body temperature than any other mammal and a slow metabolism. They can live for upwards of forty-five years and harbor the world’s largest known flea, which is named after them: Bradiopsylla echidnae. all the egg-laying mammals—four echidna species and the duck-billed platypus—live in Australia. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CNBJJ1WT&location=587))