Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia Laing austinkleon.com A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.” Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death. Poison sniffers hopereadinggoodness
The order of life Like the housers who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides income-sorting projects, or the highwaymen who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides accommodate more cars, just so, architects who venture into city design often face a blank in trying to create visual order in cities except by substituting the order of art for the very different order of life. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities A city cannot be a work of art order