I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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The reading chair, the smiley chair, the saddle chair
The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Michel de Certeau
The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite.
Michel de Certeau
The notion that exposure to violence incites violence is itself media-driven. Exposure actually does something much worse than incite violence: it cultivates a sense of insecurity and dependence that makes people submit to indignities no human being should ever have to bear.
Although from the very beginning I noticed occasional inconsistencies in Helen’s account of Scott’s death, I assumed they were simply the internal equivalent of the way different witnesses remember different versions of an accident. Only, in Helen’s case, the versions differed over time, rather than from witness to witness.
At first I thought it was something in my head, like a dream you can’t shake during the day, or a memory of something that hasn’t happened. Something akin to madness, I reasoned. So I consulted a therapist.
I was struggling to open a can of powdered milk with a pocketknife when Kombate clapped his hands outside the window of my house and called, “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!”
Only about half the number of people come to Ma’s funeral as to Dad’s. And Paul didn’t even bother to show up. I might have been madder if he did, anyways. At church Father Dietz didn’t have much to say about her. A woman’s life is not worth as much as a man’s, especially on a farm.
Marcus and I agreed to share parenting equally, splitting our child in half like a Georgia watermelon. We flipped a coin for the first month: three out of five. I won. Tonight, my month alone with Lee is over; Marcus is scheduled to pick him up at seven.