Something to Write Home About

To be aware of the mortality of Gaia, to grow up not only knowing that one is going to die, and that the Earth is going to die, but also that it might happen soon. I remember the feeling when I was told that the sun is growing and that in a few thousand years it will become impossible to live on Earth. a fw thousand years sounds scary enough. it feels foundational to one's cosmology. But to feel that the whole world might not last a century... Is this the fate of my children? or theirs, at best? PHOTO LINO MAGALHAES

Life in the city is made possible by a fragile web of mutual trust, though a filigree of unspoken pleasantries, and an intricate meshwork of altruistic gestures. A permanent exchange of mute interrogations and minute nods between strangers forms a complex language that ensures the common conditions for survival. Of course we can see bodies looking past other bodies, trying to walk though, overtake, get there before them, without knowing very well where exactly is there, or whether there is in fact a desired place, or if what there is to do there is actually what needs doing. But that is always what is emphasised when talking about the city, isn't it, the rat race. It's a gross version of urban metabolism in which life and its processes are reduced to competition between contained unities, as if one had just arrived from a rushed reading of the theory of evolution and had forgotten how life is sustained by a convuluted tangle of symbiotic connections with other animals, pla