Discover Top Posts Tagged with #elisa gabbert

An array of translations is decision porn.

Elisa Gabbert, "The Joy of Reading One Poem in Many Different Translations"

#elisa gabbert #césar vallejo #clayton eshleman #margaret jull costa #valentino gianuzzi #michael smith #poetry translation

Elisa Gabbert

#elisa gabbert #poetry

"A book is one of the more buildable utopias."

– Elisa Gabbert, "The Essay As Realm"

#elisa gabbert #any person is the only self #essays #commonplace book #quotes #georgia review #nonfiction

The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

Magnificent creations beget magnificent failures. It is awesome that we built them; it was awesome when they fell. Horror and awe are not incompatible; they are intertwined. (Magnificent Desolation, p. 20)

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Do we need to feel bad in order to do good? The psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote a book called Against Empathy, argues, or perhaps hopes, that we can be moral without depending on empathy, which is biased and unreliable— we shouldn't dole out aid in accordance with the amount of sympathy we feel for people, he claims; we should help the people who need the most help. The answer, in Bloom's mind, is not to dial up our sympathy for everyone, to unsustainable levels, but to dial it down so that we can approach problems more logically. (He quotes Elaine Scarry: "Bring everyone to the same level by diminishing yourself. Put yourself, and those you love, on the level of strangers.") Even Baron-Cohen, who equates "empathy erosion" with evil itself, concedes that there are people with zero empathy (severe autistics) who are also rigidly moral; they manage this by systematizing right and wrong. This seems to indicate that good ethics don't depend on the feeling of empathy. However, most of us are not that systematic. (I'm So Tired, pp. 224-25)

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As the injustices pile up, and reserves run low, the question of where we should focus our moral attention becomes critical—when exposed to more evils than we can possibly attend to, most of us feel helpless. And what, more than helplessness, excuses apathy and inaction? Rather than confront global suffering, we may cull our feeds, or stop watching the news. Or, worse, we may make of the suffering other an enemy, turning apathy to antipathy. These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy— they are almost innocent, almost "self-care." (We're not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.) But layered together, they have the shade of evil. (In Our Midst, p. 234)

#elisa gabbert #book quotes

6/11/25

"I don't understand why the pilots tell you the cruising altitude.

Like, what's that got to do with me?"

Elisa Gabbert, from "The Beginning of Understanding Is the Wish to Die"

#elisa gabbert #The Beginning of Understanding Is the Wish to Die

I’ve become obsessed with the idea of a meadow, a meadow I am not in. Yellow flowers are in the meadow. They must be; they are part of my idea of a meadow. There is the yellow on green below, the flowers in the grass, the white on blue above. My viewpoint is in the middle, though I’m not in the meadow. It forms a white line extending out to the horizon, a line that is real in the real of the meadow— When the meadow is real, so is the line. You can think of the meadow as kind. But the meadow is indifferent to human life—even to mine, even my meadow. My meadow with day moon and trickling stream, rabbit and magpie. White wisp of cloud, white snow on the mountain, the meadow a valley— There is cloud wisp and flowers, but they are not for me, when the meadow is real. I’m not in the meadow. The meadow is not mine.

The Idea of a Meadow by Elisa Gabbert

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