About this Event
If the world is made of problems to be solved, then to admit you are out of solutions is to reach the end of the world. To those who get to play the grown-ups in our societies, anything is better than to make such an admission. So it falls to the rest of us, those who are willing to sound foolish, to say that the map is mistaken, the world is not a problem to be solved. — At Work in the Ruins
Dougald Hine – co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of – has long been fascinated by the work of Lewis Hyde, the renowned author of , and . On September 20, they will meet for the first time in a public conversation hosted by Arnoldia and the Unitarian Universalist Association.
These two writers share a deep source of inspiration in the radical thought of Ivan Illich. The Gift grew out of a month that Lewis spent at Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the early 1970s, while Dougald has worked with many of Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators. Meanwhile, in writing about the role of culture at “the end of the world as we know it”, Dougald has drawn on Lewis’s vision of the artist as a trickster-like figure, capable of finding the hidden move that opens the path to other, unknown worlds to come.
These and other themes will weave together in the course of a conversation where we go in search of the strange gifts to be found in the ruins, in the spirit of the closing lines of the Dark Mountain manifesto:
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead to the unknown world that lies ahead.
Our host and moderator will be the Arnold Arboretum's Matthew Battles, editor of Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees and author of books including Library: An Unquiet History and Tree.
This event has been made possible by the support of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Unitarian Universalist Association, 24 Farnsworth Street, Boston, United States
GBP 0.00
