Introduction

• Memoir:

  • "A week after finishing the path, I was searching through a drawer for some ChapStick when all at once and without any warning, my balance failed. The world began to roll and spin. I was suddenly a very small boat in very high seas. My eyes shivered in their sockets, and I began vomiting. I was rushed to the hospital, and for weeks afterward, the world spun and spun" (Green 9).

• Research

  • "Eventually I was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, a disease of the inner ear with a wonderfully resonant name that is nonetheless an unambiguously one-star experience" (Green 9).

• Reflection

  • "Amid the crisis—and writing to you from April of 2021, I am still amid it—I find much to fear and lament. But I also see humans working together to share and distribute what we collectively learn, and I see people working together to care for the sick and vulnerable. Even separated, we are bound up in each other. As Sarah told me, there are no observers; only participants" (Green 14).

  • "It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I’ve started to feel it the last couple of years" (Green 15).

• I found it fascinating how writing reviews is linked in the Anthropocene. Writing reviews, like writing a memoir, changes the ratings of a certain thing, whether it is a film, book, restaurant, or medication, similar to living in the Anthropocene, in which humans, as a massively mighty force, contribute to the restructuring and changing of the planet, for better or worse. 

Lascaux Cave Paintings

• Memoir

  • "I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three, and yet to look at their little hands from those early artworks is to be inundated with a strange, soul-splitting joy. Those pictures remind me that my kids are not just growing up but also growing away from me, running toward their own lives" (Green 39).

• Research

  • "The paeloanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has theorized that the abstract dots and squiggles found in cave paintings may have been an early form of written language, with a consistent set of meanings even across broad distances" (Green 42).

  • Reflection

    • "The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents" (Green 43).

  • Even Pablo Picasso, a renowned artist of all time, is in awe at how such cave paintings were created by humans of the past when he visited the Lascaux, as he reportedly said, “We have invented nothing,” meaning that such form of art existed even during the hunter gatherer era. I find it fascinating that in an era when humans were fighting for survival, they still found time to indulge in art, demonstrating that art is truly a timeless way of expression.  

Sunsets

• Memoir

  • "A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I’ll admit, though, that when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, “This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake" (Green 87).

• Research

  • "If you turned yourself away from a magnificent landscape and looked instead at the landscape’s reflection in the Claude glass, it was said to appear more “picturesque.” Named after seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look like a painting" (Green 87-88).

• Reflection

  • "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" (Green 91).

• I found it intriguing how he connects vulnerability and beauty. Many people value vulnerability because it is considered to be authentic, genuine, and honest. Green's shift from assuming that sunsets looked "photoshopped" to now viewing them as perfect demonstrates how vulnerability can be perceived as beautiful because it is authentic and "unfiltered."