memoryslandscape:

“Whether landscape is a mirror, a theatre, a text, or a seamless continuity with its inhabitants, it is the place from which we draw meaning, feeling; it is the armature for existence, the realm in which place and culture co-exist, and where the self dwells […] ‘Landscape is not perspective and horizon, a particular shape or defined aesthetics, but caught in its occurrence of affects: felt smudges, smears, kaleidoscope, a multi-sensual expressive poetics of potentiality, becoming and poetics: shuffling, unstable and lively.’

With this expansive and meaning-imbued terrain the landscape holds within it the natural habitat for melancholy, as the locus of places of contemplation, memory, death, sadness. Yet, the place of melancholy with the landscape is one which is often resisted, marginalized and edited out.”

Jacky Bowring, from Melancholy and the Landscape: Locating Sadness, Memory, and Reflection in the Landscape (Routledge, 2017)

diagonalmovement:

We need to encourage a more active struggle against apathy. Apathy as the result of being beaten down by the world while also having to witness countless others endure the same is more than understandable. But it is not something to encourage or commend. 

It is too easy to look around and say, “People will always be hurt”. But if you look at the state of your world and can only focus on the “always” instead of the “people” something has gone wrong. 

We do not live in a world that will suddenly cater to you because you have figured out the trick, peered behind the oppressive curtain. It only seems that way because you have chosen to ignore the parts of your world that you were once so righteously angry about.

Apathy has many different forms, but the main two I’ve encountered have been an exhausted depression and a smug cynicism. The world is an exhausting place, it takes and takes and in order to survive in it, and you usually have to give it more than you have. Which is why the communities we surround ourselves with are important. They can anchor us in something bigger, help us realize we aren’t alone. As for cynicism, it is only capable of taking things apart, never building them up. Trying to tear down the efforts of those around you will eventually leave you stranded, with nothing to stand on but your own sense of superiority. 

A strong sense of justice, optimism, and speechifying are not enough to change the world we live in, history has proven this again and again. Forsaking or rebuking these tools for the sake of the individual is a very human thing to do. A tendency we must continue to combat if humanity is ever going to be greater than the sum of its parts.