What’s missing, you could say, is a sense of Coyote’s world instead of Yahweh’s. - P78
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. - P79
For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. - P79
The moon is profound except when we land on it. - P80
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. - P80
For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless. - P80
The heretics recognized that before the fall we were not yet fully human—in Paradise, Adam and Eve need not wrestle with morality, with creation, with society, with mortality; they only realize their own humanity in the struggle an imperfect world invites. - P80
Humor, creativity, outrageousness, and exuberance were among the group’s hallmarks. - P82
"There is no day without its moments of paradise." And then the day continues. - P82
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