Timeless, certainly. A tale warning that those afflicted with greed will work in collusion to keep everyone around them equally afflicted and poor. Maybe this is leftist brain rot but this really does seem to be about the peril of colonial capitalism and how it eats us from inside. I don’t know if Steinbeck was the best voice for what i’m assuming is an indigenous story, and his thoughts on “men and women” are unoriginal but this was a good fable.

This is beautiful. It feels like a musing on the fleeting and permanent sides of creativity and art, and it’s gorgeous to read through. It is hard at times to understand what’s going on due to the simplicity of some frames but that sort of adds to the unique otherness overall.

“The veil as object appears now accompanied and offset by other veils: the veils of ignorance and bigotry, the veils of prejudice and hatred, of xenophobia and racism. These veils cannot be seen as easily as the veil that is the subject of this book, but they enable their own subterfuge, take from all those caught in ther folds the ability to see.”

This book was a great read, with varied perspective and a lot of insightful anecdotal cases. It’s beautifully written, toeing the line between pragmatic and poetic in every chapter. It tackles something I’ve been thinking about for myself lately (surveillance, our right to privacy, the private safety of masks) and applies an intersection to it with far more history than my little pandemic-inspired thoughts.