The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.

Timothy Morton

Categorized in : Job Forest Sun Light

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.

Timothy Morton

our-world earth faces

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

Timothy Morton

pedestal afar doe

Paradoxically, capital has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.

Timothy Morton

cells revenge years

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

Timothy Morton

derrida assumption talking

This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time.

Timothy Morton

science

I like being irritating.

Timothy Morton

being like irritating

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

Timothy Morton

hosting me bacteria vehicle

Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation.

Timothy Morton

think you space conversation

If you're facing rejection right now, it's very important to realize, especially in a down market, that it's not personal. Really. Truly. The indifference of the system is also crushing. But perhaps it's better than thinking that someone was out to get you.

Timothy Morton

down better you thinking

Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.

Timothy Morton

rules own being brain

Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.

Timothy Morton

everything railway future past

I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.

Timothy Morton

birds day lights night

An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.

Timothy Morton

future work time art

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

Timothy Morton

sense presence physical nothing

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.

Timothy Morton

emergency our proactive choices

A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.

Timothy Morton

job think you writing

In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.

Timothy Morton

well space time ideas

The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.

Timothy Morton

human go garbage earth

The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.

Timothy Morton

homophobic stage russia world

Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.

Timothy Morton

thought ecological consumerism peril