There’s an American word I’ve always disliked which is the word fix, in the sense of just making a problem disappear. “The only way we’re going to fix this is blah blah blah”: this way of thinking is just general. The world actually can’t be fixed.

All Year Zero experiments fail dramatically, whether we’re talking about Cambodia, or we’re talking about the French revolution, or the Soviet Socialist Republics, or China. You can’t go back to Year Zero, you can’t kill your way out of the problem of living. I don’t like the word fix even in its lesser forms, it makes me uncomfortable. The once and for all fix: there is no once and for all fix for anything.

The word I like is the word “repair”: more tentative, more humble. Actually, repair sounds to me like a word that has been feminized because we think of somebody stitching, somebody weaving, somebody making something carefully with their hands and making do. The marines go in there to fix things, they don’t go in there to repair things. Repair can always be undone. I’m thinking of Penelope, unweaving what she has woven, weaving and unweaving. The provisional character of repair, I would say, is where I try to center my thinking. This is not a quietist view of the world, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything. We should do something: we should be repairing.

But what does repair look like? There are ever expanding circles of responsibility and care from wherever we’re located. We have responsibilities to the people closest to us. Those of us who work in image-making, broadcasting, and writing have discursive responsibilities that go beyond the people in our immediate household or circle of friends. Because of social media now, very, very many people are in the role of broadcasting, and the responsibility of repair is actually larger now because we can reach larger groups of people. We’re always going to have these horrifying problems with us. That’s not an attitude of defeat. We can ameliorate some of them, that’s the work, it’s like individual work that then gradually becomes collective work.

-Teju Cole, Between the Covers Podcast

Teju Cole remains an incredible source of strength and inspiration. The way he slowly, carefully chooses the words he speaks is truly beautiful to hear. He’s not a person who simply engages verbal flow, the precision with which he communicates hints at a divine, effortless control over his own psyche.