Potatoes from the root cellar

After her book, Flight Behavior, which deals with climate change, a reviewer asked Barbara Kingsolver how she could be so optimistic.  She answered this way: “I’m a hopeful person, though not necessarily optimistic . . . . The pessimist would say, ‘Oh it’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.’ The optimist would say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.’ The hopeful person would say, ‘Maybe someone’s going to be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar, just in case.’”

I grew up in another world, and I don’t quite trust the words brought to us electronically.  To hedge against the time when somebody pulls the plug, and everything online goes away, I keep way too many books, and I keep lists of quotes and sayings that remind me what life is about and why I should hope.  Here are four that remind me how we are and what our lives are about:

“Thinking is difficult; that’s why most people judge.” C.G. Jung

“Our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”  Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope

We who wait upon You shall renew our strength.  We shall rise up on wings of eagles; we shall run and be weary; we shall walk and not faint. Isiah (paraphrased)

"What are we here for, if not to read?" Carlin Sappenfield