A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
What a gem of a book! It’s unlike anything I’ve read before. I don’t even know how to describe it. I’d read that this book felt like a hug and it really does.
“We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
I had a hard time getting into this book for some reason but once I did, it captured my heart and I loved every moment I spent with it. What a gift.
“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
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