Dust.

My brother Adam and I attended an Ash Wednesday service tonight. I love Lenten music—all the sharps—and the ashes. You are dust and to dust you shall return. Some people find our impermanence unsettling, but I find it reassuring. For everything that happens to us in this life, however wonderful or terrible, our entire lives are just the briefest flicker. We return to dust.

Sitting in Church, I was also thinking about one of my main hopes/fears about organized religion. If God turns out to be just an invention of the human mind, I hope that we can say that everything we did in the name of religion was also in the service of humanity and our planet. It saddens and sickens me to see people fall back on religion to wage war, defend intolerance and inhumanity, excuse hateful attitudes and behaviors, and justify the exploitation of our natural resources. So often religion seems to turn people cruel and rigid. I wish that we could say—God or no god—that our religious beliefs make us kinder to one another and more mindful stewards of our planet.

This is why I went into journalism, initially:

Many years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel 'insignificant and lost amid the crowd,' cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a beacon to bring together people who otherwise might ineffectively seek each other 'in darkness.' Newspapers can bring them 'together and... keep them united.' If there were no newspapers or if newspapers failed to do their task, he observed, 'there would be no common activity.'

Now I don't know. We treat so much drivel as news, preferring to ignore the real issues. We insist on seeing events as isolated and out of context, beyond our ability to help or even just understand. We embrace the easy answer. (Why do they hate us? Because we are free. Free to do what, exactly? Free to change the channel?) A few newspapers still serve as 'beacons,' but how many people are earnestly looking for that light? We all seem to be looking inward, we're bowling alone, and I think we're worse off for it.

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf.

Here I come to the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?

* * * * *

When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated...

* * * * *

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device—a means of summing up and making innumerable details visible in one concrete picture. ... Whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative, enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational): the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes—for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent? Is this liability to scenes the origin of my writing impulse? Are other people also scene makers? These are questions to which I have no answer. Perhaps sometimes I will consider it more carefully. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because, in all the writing I have done, I have almost always had to make a scene, . . . when I am writing about a person; I must find a representative scene in their lives. . .