Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.”  To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Nobel Laureate 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp