Virginia Eubanks

Books this week:

1) Larissa MacFarquhar, *Strangers Drowning*

2) Ursula Le Guin, *The Left Hand of Darkness* (Re-read)

3) Pekka Hämäläinen, *Indigenous Continent*

"The essence of being human...is [to be] prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." (MacFarquhar 2015: 9, quoting Orwell).

#bookstodon #books #AmReading #Reading #BooksThisWeek

Jul 18, 2023 at 6:52pmWeb
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 18, 2023
MacFarquhar got me interested in something psychoanalysts used to call "Psychotic Altruism." Anyone have good resources on this? Essays? Research articles? Intrigued.
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 18, 2023
Might revisit Andrew Solomon's *Far from the Tree,* too. Thinking about "unreasonable love" this week.
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 20, 2023
MacFarquhar crushing it in the last chapter (1/3):
"Some do-gooders are happy, some are not. The happy ones are happy for the same reasons anyone is happy--love, work, purpose. It's do-gooders' unhappiness that is different--a reaction not only to humiliation and lack of love and the other usual stuff, but also to knowing that the world is filled with misery, and that most people don't really notice or care, and that, try as they might, they cannot do much about either of those things. ...
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 20, 2023
(2/3)... "What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility. ...
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 20, 2023
(3/3) ... "Do-gooders are different from ordinary people because they are willing to weight their lives and their families in a balance with the needs of strangers. They are willing to risk the one for the sake of the other. They, like anyone else, believe that they have duties to their families, but they draw the line between family and strangers in a different place. It's not that they value strangers more: it's that they remember that strangers have lives and families, too." (pp 299-300)
Show threadadalyJul 18, 2023
@VirginiaEubanks I'm reading Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed for the first time this week!
Show threadVirginia EubanksJul 18, 2023
@nidhalaigh I find that one a little ham-handed as a piece of fiction, but love the ideas. There's a great quote in there about democracy being like grass; it thrives on being stepped on.