Mobility

Bunny was surprised at how quickly some of these incidents, so consequential at the time, had been disappeared from the pool of generalized knowledge in which she swam. Exxon Valdez, of course she knew that — it was the prototype for malfeasance, the villain of her childhood. Deepwater Horizon, it seemed, would take a similar place in the collective mind. But Texas City? She had driven past it and never known. Piper Alpha? Bohai? Ocean Ranger? Kielland? The tragedy and waste and environmental degradation sobered her. And yet in the accounts found in the Turnbridge reading room these tragedies were made small against the inexorability of a steel tube drilling down thousands of feet, drilling sideways a thousand feet more, seeming to subvert the laws of geology or physics. Literal pipelines laid under the ground and spanning two continents, traveling under the ocean itself, to bring them their standard of living. There was no arguing with it, Bunny felt. Astronauts died going to space, she told herself.

Mobility, p. 171
By Lydia Kiesling
Published 2023

Eileen

At that moment, I felt happy. Meeting Rebecca was like learning to dance, discovering jazz. It was like falling in love for the first time. I had always been waiting for my future to erupt around me in an avalanche of glory, and now I felt it was really happening. Rebecca was all it took. Per aspera ad astra.

Eileen, p. 124
By Ottessa Moshfegh
Published 2015

Poverty, by America

There is not one banking sector. There are two — one for the poor and one for the rest of us — just as there are two housing markets and two labor markets. The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not. Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated.

Poverty, by America, p. 78
By Matthew Desmond
Published 2023