10.03.2025 (2): Little Living

[sunshowerdandelion]

Today I read that famous 2022 review of Hanya Yanagihara's works by Andrea Long Chu, and was very affected by its conclusion. Yanagihara writes of luxuries and their undersides and also did a lot of travel writing, but also:

It is indeed a tourist’s imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two.

Being one of those locals has definitely colored my view of her works now. I am so very far from even the trace of New York and what all those streetnames mean. I think that a lot of contemporary dystopian stuff is couched in this inability to live in the inbetween, the middle ground between paradise and death, and it's all fear fear fear. It's either one or the other is the thing I see in a lot of films and games. As if we aren't now living - sliding - into that middle ground and making dreams all the same in the squalor. It's not all brutal, twisted, or grim, I mean, the stuff can be very commonplace and people adapt and try to be kind to each other.