(no subject)
Reading The Windup Girl. It’s beautiful and bleak. A well painted portrait of a wrecked ecology and the economy that creates. Maybe too close to my personal nightmares to start with, but also nice to know they’re other people’s nightmares too.
This passage got me:
Jaidee has seen these ghosts as well, walking the boulevards sometimes, sitting in the trees. Phii are everywhere now. Too many to count. He has seen them in graveyards and and leaning against the bones of riddled bo trees, all of them looking at him with some irritation. Mediums all speak of how crazy with frustration the Phii are, how they cannot reincarnate and thus linger, like a great mass of people at Hualamphong Station hoping for a train down to the beaches. All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.
Maybe it’s that I grew up fascinated with reincarnation. Maybe it’s that I was urn-shopping today. The fear of leaving a wasteland for future generations is more obvious, more relevant, more motivating, still the push I’d use to advertise conservation. But there’s something haunting about the idea of collectively screwing up so badly that it cheats our ancestors out of nirvana, that it becomes impossible for spiritual progress to be made at all. Literally breaking the world so badly that no one can become a better person. I suspect that is an important part of the underlying horror of both the book and my bad dreams.
This passage got me:
Jaidee has seen these ghosts as well, walking the boulevards sometimes, sitting in the trees. Phii are everywhere now. Too many to count. He has seen them in graveyards and and leaning against the bones of riddled bo trees, all of them looking at him with some irritation. Mediums all speak of how crazy with frustration the Phii are, how they cannot reincarnate and thus linger, like a great mass of people at Hualamphong Station hoping for a train down to the beaches. All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.
Maybe it’s that I grew up fascinated with reincarnation. Maybe it’s that I was urn-shopping today. The fear of leaving a wasteland for future generations is more obvious, more relevant, more motivating, still the push I’d use to advertise conservation. But there’s something haunting about the idea of collectively screwing up so badly that it cheats our ancestors out of nirvana, that it becomes impossible for spiritual progress to be made at all. Literally breaking the world so badly that no one can become a better person. I suspect that is an important part of the underlying horror of both the book and my bad dreams.