[b]Jonathan Safran Foer
Home is the place with the most rules.[/b]
So, more opportunities to break them.
…I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life…
You know, if applicable. To you, for example.
No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother “Mama.” No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, as she sleeps, that it will be four decades before she will again awake infertile. No mother knows she is hearing the word Mama for the last time. No father knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story he will ever read: From that day on, and for many years to come, peace reigned on the island of Ithaca, and the gods looked favorably upon Odysseus, his wife, and his son.
Clearly, that about covers it.
He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone else loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one else loves your, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.
Not all that far removed from “I hate you”.
Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.
Let’s just chalk it all up instead to an essentially absurd and meaningless world.
Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.
Or, as likely as not, engagement with the solution. In particular, when it isn’t yours.