8 × 3.5 feet
Acrylic painting on heavyweight paper
2026
Toni Morrison’s essay “The Future of Time” says that, without dismissing existential issues, we must break up with The End of The World and imagine the future. Her direct words:
“We are tentative about articulating a long earthly future; we are cautioned against the luxury of its meditation as a harmful deferral and displacement of contemporary issues.”
“Oddly enough it is in the modern West -where advance, progress, and change have been signatory features -where confidence in an enduring future is at its slightest.”
“No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030.”
“To weigh the future of future requires some powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. It will require thinking about the generations to come as life forms at least as important as cathedral-like forests and glistening seals. It will require thinking about generations to come as more than a century or so of one’s own family line, group stability, gender, sex, race, religion. Thinking about how we might respond if certain that our own line would last two thousand, twelve thousand more earthly years.”
“It will require thinking about the quality of human life, not just its length. The quality of intelligent life, not just its strategizing abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for pity.”
A few years ago I took Morrison’s challenge to visualize my line 2,000 years from now. I imagined a girl in a meadow, at peace, with full bodily autonomy, and was surprised at the emotion it brought. For all of the opportunity and comfort of my own life compared to previous generations, I had never allowed myself to imagine this girl. She was too much to hope for. Existential threats are imminent, but how many generations have thought they were the last? Maybe it is honest but human to think that the world will end when I do. I am choosing risk & hope in a better future over the comfort and control of expecting the worst.
This piece is the meadow 2,000 years from now where I hope all of our progeny can sit, knowing peace.
Link for “The Future of Time” essay, by Toni Morrison.
8 × 3.5 feet
Acrylic painting on heavyweight paper
2026
Toni Morrison’s essay “The Future of Time” says that, without dismissing existential issues, we must break up with The End of The World and imagine the future. Her direct words:
“We are tentative about articulating a long earthly future; we are cautioned against the luxury of its meditation as a harmful deferral and displacement of contemporary issues.”
“Oddly enough it is in the modern West -where advance, progress, and change have been signatory features -where confidence in an enduring future is at its slightest.”
“No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030.”
“To weigh the future of future requires some powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. It will require thinking about the generations to come as life forms at least as important as cathedral-like forests and glistening seals. It will require thinking about generations to come as more than a century or so of one’s own family line, group stability, gender, sex, race, religion. Thinking about how we might respond if certain that our own line would last two thousand, twelve thousand more earthly years.”
“It will require thinking about the quality of human life, not just its length. The quality of intelligent life, not just its strategizing abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for pity.”
A few years ago I took Morrison’s challenge to visualize my line 2,000 years from now. I imagined a girl in a meadow, at peace, with full bodily autonomy, and was surprised at the emotion it brought. For all of the opportunity and comfort of my own life compared to previous generations, I had never allowed myself to imagine this girl. She was too much to hope for. Existential threats are imminent, but how many generations have thought they were the last? Maybe it is honest but human to think that the world will end when I do. I am choosing risk & hope in a better future over the comfort and control of expecting the worst.
This piece is the meadow 2,000 years from now where I hope all of our progeny can sit, knowing peace.
Link for “The Future of Time” essay, by Toni Morrison.
