part(ners

  

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The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.


—James Lovelock

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For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof. 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). 

Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

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There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.

Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. 

And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. 

Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing 

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