“‘When you smoke your pipe, you feel an initial rush of stimulation, followed by a calmness, a steadying of the nerves. This is but a trace, a shadow, of nicotine poisoning. If you were cut with this dagger, that relaxation of the nerves would advance to the point where you would simply forget to breathe, […]
“‘I am pleased by the cleverness of this trick that the English have played, to win wars against their betters by tinkering with what wealth is. Because of it, I do not have to marry some inbred Bourbon, as poor Eliza did, and live out my days at Versailles, or in the Escorial. But I […]
With the garage nearly finished, Dan, Sean and I have turned our attention to the larger project of extending the north wall of my mother’s house and converting our old garage into a cozy dwelling space. Building a house addition is a different beast than constructing something from scratch. Not only do designers and builders […]
A hefty portion of humanity’s uniqueness can be traced back to future projection. We constantly weave narratives that stretch moments and months and millennia ahead, even as we fumble to figure out what to do with today, each day. Everyone needs some kind of intellectual framework to navigate this tricky tension, which is where futurists […]
“Daniel glanced curiously down the segment of Mint Street that had just come into view. He was strangely let down to see that it was quiet and almost peaceful. He’d been hoping that the Mint would only become more Hellish the deeper he went into it, like the Inferno according to Dante, and that in […]
“‘Our only weapon against this willful ignorance is stories. The stories that you alone are writing down. I have in one of my boxes down stairs a little packet of letters from English men and women that all go something like this: ‘I have never had the least objection to Slavery, however your book recently […]
“As a wave passes through a rug that is being shaken, driving before it a front of grit, fleas, apple seeds, tobacco-ashes, pubic hairs, scab-heads, &c., so the expansion of London across the defenseless green countryside pushed before it all who had been jarred loose by Change, or who simply hadn’t been firmly tied down […]
“Smoke rings propagate through clear air, proving that they indeed carry their own substance with them, neither diluting it with, nor dispersing it into, the surrounding atmosphere. And yet there is nothing special about the smoke as such––it is the same smoke that hangs over battlefields in shapeless clouds. The identity of a smoke ring […]
“He was of an age where it was never possible to pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another […]
The notion that an authentic assessment of value requires more than a cursory glance manifests in many forms: don’t judge a book by its cover; appearances can be deceiving; all that glitters is not gold; his beauty was only skin deep. My upbringing was riddled with reminders of this sort, but it was also clear […]