Health + Youth

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT: The president should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, at the point when NASA ends communications with the men: A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.
—via The Atlantic, with thanks to Patrick Ryan

“Trump’s ruse is that somehow the United States is not engaged militarily in the fight against isis, or that ‘political correctness’ is the chief factor undermining American security. He feeds his constituents daily with the misbegotten notion that the country is being flooded with countless unchecked ‘aliens’ from the Middle East, South Asia, and Mexico. The mouth moves and the lies pour forth. Any contrary evidence, any complexity, is foreign. Questioned on television to prove his points, faced with contrary evidence, he talks past it. Never mind all the firepower expended against isis targets, the territory gained, and the difficulty of taking back cities when ordinary civilians are used, en masse, as human shields. We are weak; we are politically correct.”
—Remnick

“Given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.”
—Adam Frank

“In making one-man rule work successfully at Rome, after almost half a millennium of (more or less) democracy, and establishing a ‘workable entente’ between the old aristocracy and the new autocracy, Augustus resorted to a game of smoke and mirrors in which everyone, it seems, was play-acting. ‘The senators had to act as if they still possessed a degree of power that they no longer had, while the emperor had to exercise his power in such a way as to dissemble his possession of it.’ As others too have recently emphasised (in particular Shadi Bartsch in Actors in the Audience), the politics of the empire were founded on double-speak: no one said exactly what they meant, or meant exactly what they said. It is no surprise that, on his deathbed, Augustus is supposed to have quoted a line, in Greek, from a comic drama, comparing his own role to an actor’s: ‘If I’ve played my part well, clap your hands – and send me off the stage with applause.’”
—Mary Beard

“This gap is also shown throughout Carver’s story in the multiple references to the ways in which a body can be protected or covered. There’s discussion about knights and the armor that they wear; a description of how beekeepers cover themselves; and Mel describes the casts on the elderly couple, with holes for their eyes and mouths. These devices serve to protect but also to inhibit the ability to connect. In Durbin’s story, this translates to Neal’s house, which is being renovated in order to appear on a reality television show. Lights are being installed; fake stars are painted on a ceiling; and blood is removed via varnish and stain. A world constructed, for television: a world that’s fake, where things are covered up rather than exposed, a house that is not really a home.”
—Laura Spence-Ash

“I asked if he thought he’d married an incompetent woman, which cut to the bone, because the source of our problems was that, in fact, he had. For years at a time I was good only at the things that interested me, and since all that interested me was my work and my children, the rest of life had sort of inched away. And while it’s true that my children were endlessly fascinating, two petri dishes growing human cultures, being a mother never had been, and all that seemed assigned by default of gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes, I would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, I would not make playdates, never ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on monthlong adventures to Europe, teach them to blast off rockets, to swim for glory. I taught them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human. My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in debt that increases every day but that you have no intention of repaying.”
—Lauren Groff

“Suddenly I feel like the embodiment of the dumbest parts of American culture — those insufferable people who talk about ‘vibes,’ suggest meditation as a cure for everything, say, My passion is travel.

“’Don’t worry,” the woman tells me, patting my hand. ‘Rafa will help you.’”
—Diana Spechler

”Baptism”
after Jean-Michel Basquiat

there is such a thing as forgiveness,
and it is the water, here,
engulfing my waist. my hands up,
smother this blackness, lord,
and remove this flesh. i see him.
the lord. in the faces of men
like my father. my father’s father.
i see him. the pastor. ready to remove
all this sin. all this touching
of boys in dark places. we’re both
black around the eyes. our mouths
mimic each other’s: we come gathered
like murder of crows. he opens his beak,
out comes scripture. i close my eyes,
release tears. take me lord, oh sweet
river of purity. chaos sweeps the land.
and it is the land of the living
i fear the most. the way boys grope
this body to feel alive. the way i give
them my father’s name. we’re both
dirty creatures. but not for long.
soon, the pastor will baptize me
in the name of the father,
the son, and the holy spirit.
soon, i’ll molt this blackness, let
it cipher into the waves.
i plug my nose. smile sweet.
there is such a thing as forgiveness.
i have found it, here, inside the
pastor’s grip. the water-coffin
keeping what’s left of me. i see him.
my old self. ol’ luther. look how
unhappy you were. how sin
has taken all of you.
—Luther Hughes

“So I’m on a panel last night and somebody asks, how does one write when overcome with emotion, mostly grief I’m assuming. How does one get words to paper when going through such upheaval? I was so mystified by the question that I didn’t answer for fear that I would become the night’s asshole. But I’m still mystified by it, because I don’t bring my present emotional state into my writing. Had I done that I would never have made it through my first novel, which was written under near suicidal distress. If anything, writing was the one place I didn’t have to be myself.

“I say this to my students, who feel they need to be in some calm emotional space to create: Listen, I’m sure you think you’re going through a rough time, and that roughness is real. But I’m going to guess that you’re probably not having as rough a time as Virginnia Woolf did, and lady still got tons of shit done. My point, is I could never imagine my emotions, my situation daring to have a say in how I work. That I become some kind of journalist, and how bad or good my day goes, has no effect on how I cover a childbirth or a car crash. The art couldn’t care less how I feel. Guernica couldnt give a shit if Picasso was in his happy place, because well Guernica doesn’t have thoughts, it’s a piece of art that needs to be created and that creation will not be denied, or even delayed by how Picasso feels.

“My novel couldn’t give a shit if I hate the world and want to die. Art doesn’t give a shit. Least of all for pop psychology. The problem with it is that we start to look for emotional biography, that superficial way of looking at art as just a window into the artist. Look at this another way. Last night I was with some people who were convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Elena Ferrante’s work was autobiographical. It just had to be, because that’s the only way they can view the creation of art. So I asked if they thought she just wasn’t capable of talent and imagination, and suddenly they were the ones mystified by a question. They glanced at me with this “you poor thing,” look, before doing that silly half dismissal, ‘well sure talent has something to do with it, but….“

“Of course if you’re woman you get this bullshit all the time, that not only is all your art experiential, that by mapping your art to your emotional space, I’m actually giving you some kind of compliment. And it’s not just books. A couple years ago, Pitchfork wrote this tedious article on Janelle Monae where the journalist just couldn’t get past the fact that Monae hast bared her soul yet. To this guy, she was making inferior art, something that nobody has ever said about Bowie. This is not to say that semi-autobigrapical fiction is bad. But even in such cases and indeed even in nonfiction, writer has to turn into character, "I” has to turn into “eye,” distance has to give way to perspective, Narrative self had to go neck and neck with Reflective self (if not a head higher). And how you feel personally, even when writing about yourself, doesn’t count for shit.”
—Marlon James