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It is not merely about monstrous individuals, but about systemic complicity and the quiet erosion of responsibility.
The village you left only hours before — so central then — now rests distant, far below, a small point on a broader unfolding. From this higher vantage, the landscape widens and reframes the familiar in a broader context, inviting the mind to stretch gently beyond its former edges, toward a new horizon.
1) We overrate knowledge and underrate not-knowing
2) We overrate comfort and underrate discomfort.
3) We overrate action and underrate non-action (stillness).
Dostoevsky asserted more than once that understanding is achieved primarily through the heart, rather than the rational mind, and the dry and dispassionate intellectualism (in his view) of the West was a particular object of his contempt, seeing it as a dilution of our humanity.
(There are in this view echoes of Kepler, who believed that the Earth itself is an ensouled body, and of myriad native cosmogonies that regard other animals as sources of more-than-human wisdom and emissaries of the numinous.)
Sabahat Fida contemplates the implications of the caterpillar’s transformation for our understanding of identity