"because you want things so much"

"'So we never really give it up,' Bao agreed.  'What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible.  Desire is life trying to continue to be life.  All living things desire, bacteria feel desire.  Life is wanting.'

The young students thought it over.  There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting with desire.  You make love all night because you want things so much.

He said, 'Another way of rescuing the concept of reincarnation is simply to think of the species as the organism.  The organism survives, and has a collective consciousness of itself -- that's history, or language, or the twisting ladder structuring our brains -- and it doesn't really matter what happens to any one cell of this body.  In fact their deaths are necessary for the body to stay healthy and go on, it's a matter of making room for new cells.  And if we think of it that way, then it might increase feelings of solidarity and obligation to others.  It makes it clearer that if there is part of the body that is suffering, and if at the same time another part commandeers the mouth and laughs and proclaims that everything is really fine, dancing a jig like the lost Christians as their flesh fell off -- then we understand more clearly that this creature-species or species-creature is insane, and cannot face its own sickness-unto-death.  Seen in that sense, more people might understand that the organism must try to keep itself healthy throughout its whole body."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

I started this right around the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic.  Put simply, it's an alternative global history where the Black Death wipes out nine-tenths of Europe (and basically Christianity) instead of the reality of a meager one-third.  At the same time, it's a meditation on history itself told through the eyes of various characters struggling to understand and improve their surroundings.  Nine of the first ten sections end in the bardo after an inevitable catastrophe -- disease, war, murder, flooding.

I'm a Robinson stan through and through but if you're new to his stuff, this probably isn't the best place to start.  It's dense and long and not really interested in holding your hand through a cohesive narrative.  On the other hand, it's a pretty clear statement of purpose -- as a species, we either advance towards an equitable, global society that respects nature and women's rights or we all suffer and die in ignorance.

"We must love one another or die," on a world-historical level so to speak.