Lit Chat

Inspiration for being human.

End of an Era, Living Our Dream, Humanism 2.0, and Listening to Nature

Thursday May 21, 2026

Happy Thursday humans! Here is this week's literary inspiration for being human...

Let's consider the end of an era...

The Industrial Age is officially over, yet many practices and mindsets from the Industrial Age persist. Historians seem to have settled on the term "Information Age" or "Digital Age" for our current historical period, and the contemporary cultural trends are fascinating when we observe how ubiquitous access to information and digital technologies is changing the way we live, love, learn, and work. I often feel like I have a front row seat to the unfolding drama of societal shifts, partly because I interact people from many different backgrounds, but mostly because there is so much writing and discussion in the public sphere these days, and if we read and listen widely, we can witness social patterns and changes first hand.

In Woman Outside the City, I imagined a fictional world in which social practices and mindsets have not progressed as rapidly as technological advancements. This is perhaps the premise of most dystopian novels, precisely because it is a continual concern in contemporary society. 

What do you hope for by the end of the twenty-first century? What are you afraid might happen? What can you read, write, create, share, or do that will help tip the scale toward your hopes and away from your fears?

Let's live our dream...

“I am leaving you

but you know how to live. I made sure you learned to dream."

—"Left Justified" in Woman Outside the City

Dream an impossible dream... How will you start? What's your first doable step? When your dream seems impossible, how will you stare it down and continue to bring your dream to life?

Let's consider Humanism 2.0...

Translated from German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoddie, Liesl Ujvary's Good & Safe collection plays with repetition, patterns, and progressive shifts to show how congruence and incongruence define our lives and our society. Six poems excerpted from her book call our attention to collective inconsistencies, starting with the series "this is better," "this is the same," "this has always been like this," and "there will always be this" and ending with "Dialectic Objects" and "Collected Knowledge." The systematic repetition in her poems remind me of the systematization and mechanization that defined the Industrial Age, and it makes me wonder, who are we when we are not industrial? Will we all be humanists in some form or fashion (some with religious beliefs, some without)? What becomes possible for our societies if we embrace both technology and humanity?

Does being technological also involve systematization? Or will we transcend systematization and embrace humanism? Is Humanism 2.0 our new revolution?

Let's listen to nature...

I enjoy spending time outdoors in nature, and for years I have used iNaturalist's app to help me identify plants and animals. Recently, I also started paying closer attention to the sounds of nature in my neighborhood, and I use a bird identification app to help me identify birds based on their sounds. Sometimes it seems like the trees are singing, and I want to know more about the magnificent species that make my neighborhood sound like a celebration of life's natural wonders.