On the one hand, I’m with Edgar (King Lear): “The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst!’”

On the other hand, I’m with Orwell: “Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does?”

Last year Mandy Brown shared with me and a few others the notion of “far-fetching”. I’ve been meaning to e-mail her and ask where she found it, or if it’s her own.

As I received it, it’s the idea of reaching out into a desired, or necessary, future and finding some piece of it—however far-fetched—to bring (‘fetch’) back into the current moment. Something practical to do with hope, in hope. There are, and have been, many small things to far-fetch in this way.

And there’s the dharma: “this stable truth, this fixed truth: All conditional things are impermanent. (sabbe sankhara anicca)”

Things are always becoming otherwise. From this you get the other two of the three marks of existence, and the four noble truths, and the eightfold path, and so on. This is the core of the teaching and the practice.

No matter what’s happening now, something different will happen next. Let’s make that next thing fucking _good_.

Before I wander off again, Starbuck gets the last word. Doesn’t she deserve it?

You remember the episode. Things have gone absolutely to shit. Tyrol asks, “What do you want to do now, Captain?”

Starbuck says, “The same thing we always do. Fight them until we can’t.”