I want to explain that I've spent years collecting accounts of the multiple presences that can coexist within a single body, precisely in order to subvert this concept of singular, uniform, unidimensional identity. (p15)
Infants possess something that adults must seek desperately throught their lives: a refuge. It is the walls of the womb, with all the nutrients daily flowing in, that we sometimes need to rebuild around ourselves. (p76)
People like Daria know they are not alone as they live, feel, think, and listen in the forest, that other forces are at work around them. There is a potency here that is external to people, an intention unrelated to humanity. We find ourselves in an environment that's "comprenensively socialized because it is comprehensively travelled" as my old teacher Philippe Descola would have said. He revived the word animism to qualify and describe this kind of world (p78)
...I do not know everything about this encounter; I shall let the assumed desiderata of the bear's world alone; my gift shall be this uncertainty. What we need, then is to reflect on the places, creatures, and events that lie in shadow, surrounded by empty space, where we meet the experiential crux that no standard relationship can describe, that we cannot map our way out of. This is our situation now, the bear's and mine: we have become a focal point that everyone talks about but no one understands. (p79)
...no one listed to Antonin Artaud, but he was right. We have to get out of the insanity our civilization is creating. But drugs, alcohol, depression, and in fine madness and/or death are no solution; we must find something else. This is what I sought in the forests of the Far North... (p88)
I went to join the Evens of Icha, and I lived in the forest with them for a reason far removed from any requirement of comparative research. I learned one thing: no matter how it appears, the world is collapsing simultaneously everywhere. The only difference is that in Tvayan, they live knowingly amid the wreckage. (p90)
...So do you also think that I'm under a spell? If I truly am medka and being medka means being all of that, why aren't you also keeping away? I don't believe any of it, Daria replies. That's all just stories. Here, we live with all the souls, with those who ewander, those who travel, with the living, and the dead, the medka and the rest. Everyone. It always ends like that, in frustration. You might almost think that Never follow a thought through was the rule. Suspending your thought in order to interrupt your words; staying silent in order to survive. (p97)