# The Anthropocene Reviewed **Covers**:: **Source**:: [[The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green]] **Creator**:: [[John Green]] # Highlights ##### ^285888564 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=386 [[Mark Twain timed his death with Halley's comet]] ###### ^285888564q The American writer Mark Twain, for instance, was born as the comet blazed above the Missouri sky. Seventy-four years later, he wrote, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And he did, dying in 1910 as Halley reappeared. Twain had a hell of a gift for narrative structure, especially when it came to memoir. ^285888564 ##### ^285888565 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=398 [[Halley didn't discover his comet he just recognized it and predicted it's arrival]] ###### ^285888565q At any rate, Edmond* Halley noticed that the 1682 comet he observed seemed to have a similar orbit to comets that had been reported in 1607 and 1531. Fourteen years later, Halley was still thinking about the comet, writing to Isaac Newton, “I am more and more confirmed that we have seen that comett now three times since ye year 1531.” Halley then predicted the comet would return in 1758. It did, and it has been named for him ever since. ^285888565 ##### ^285888566 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=402 ###### ^285888566q individuals, it’s easy to forget that broad systems and historical forces drive shifts in human understanding. While it is true, for example, that Halley correctly predicted the comet’s return, his colleague and contemporary Robert Hooke had already expressed “a very new opinion” that some comets might be recurring. ^285888566 ##### ^287280359 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=471 ###### ^287280359q Gatsby took a circuitous route on its way to being one of the Great American Novels. ... But then, in 1942, the U.S. Council on Books in Wartime began sending books to American troops fighting in World War II. More than 150,000 copies of the Armed Services Edition of Gatsby were shipped overseas, and the book became a hit at last. ^287280359 ##### ^287280358 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=510 ###### ^287280358q in bad times, Gatsby feels like a condemnation of the American idea, and in good times it feels like a celebration of that same idea. David Denby has written that the book has “become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.” ^287280358 ##### ^287295946 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=556 ###### ^287295946q In the cave, they discovered over nine hundred paintings of animals—horses, stags, bison, and also species that are now extinct, including a woolly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid, with red, yellow, and black paint made from pulverized minerals that were likely blown through a narrow tube—possibly a hollowed bone—onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least seventeen thousand years old. ... When Pablo Picasso saw the cave paintings on a visit that year, he reportedly said, “We have invented nothing.” ^287295946 ##### ^287404947 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=1129 ###### ^287404947q Scientists sought out more productive strains of the mold, and eventually the bacteriologist Mary Hunt found one on a cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, grocery store. That strain became even more productive after being exposed to X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Essentially all penicillin in the world descends from the mold on that one cantaloupe in Peoria.* ^287404947 ##### ^287404951 highlight_tags:: [[favorite]], [[pink]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=1344 ###### ^287404951q It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. ... But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. ... And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself: This doesn’t look like a picture. And it doesn’t look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you’ve been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That’s bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars. ^287404951 ##### ^287775023 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=2140 ###### ^287775023q As with all the best sci-fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ^287775023 ##### ^287775024 highlight_tags:: [[favorite]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=2620 ###### ^287775024q When we tell those stories to people in chronic pain, or those living with incurable illness, we often end up minimizing their experience. We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. The challenge and responsibility of personhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others—to listen to others’ pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it. That capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus. ^287775024 ##### ^288175131 highlight_tags:: [[favorite]], [[pink]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08GJVLGGX&location=3299 ###### ^288175131q A child had died for no reason the night before—sudden infant death syndrome, a disease that in its name acknowledges our ignorance of it and powerlessness before it. He was a beautiful baby, and he was gone. His mother had asked me to baptize him. In my faith tradition, you’re not supposed to baptize the dead, but then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. He was the first person I ever baptized. His name was Zachary, a name taken from Hebrew words meaning, “God remembers.” ^288175131