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We are made to be destroyed

A quote from Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons that I cannot get out of my mind.  For me, it is relevant in the context of continuing to be optimistic that we can construct a sustainable civilization, even though the current Plan of Record is clearly to burn it all:

I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation.  But not because it is always benign, for it is not.  It will, with certainty, consume us all.  We are made to be destroyed.  We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time.  Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.

Bear is a Cherokee chief that adopts Will, a bound boy working in a frontier trading post.  They spend winters alone together in a kind of meditative semi-hibernation with a small crackling fire in a tiny snow-covered lodge.

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The Once and Future Friend

At some point growing up I thought that all the “old” people were so different from me.  Actually, I thought just about everyone in Sanger and the Central Valley was different from me, but looking across generations it seemed most obvious.  I think the first hint I had that there were people like me (whatever that means) from the past were Hugh and Dianne in Davis.  But it didn’t really get through.  Caltech wasn’t any better – the inter-generational divide (student to teacher mostly) was too wide to really see the faculty as people.  Nevermind the unpleasant schooling experience and all its baggage.