Mirene Arsanios

I don’t know how to remember Etel Adnan, a “person of the perpetual present,” or how to look back at her life without grieving the loss of a way of being in the world—one stubbornly anchored in a love of life and faith in humanist values. “J’aime le fait que la vie existe,” she said in a short clip widely shared on social media shortly after her death. “I love the fact that life exists”—a conviction increasingly harder to sustain on a planet in which life is relentlessly violated.