“‘My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,’ Daniel finally says. ‘To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666––Number of the Beast and all that. I was, therefore, produced in 1646––as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out. When I came of age, I […]
“‘He will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.’ ‘Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?’ It made his head ache. How was he able to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? ‘Something is […]
“There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men. What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within us, struggles to be born.” ––Anthem, by Ayn Rand, loc. 877 “A learned person once told me about her favorite sentence, one that she said comes closer to defining […]
Since I started gardening, I’ve heard this adage more than a few times: “You’ll always want more growing space!” We are already producing so much food that we’ve begun hounding friends into taking home bags of greens and are also selling small amounts as well, but Ma and I are still committed to figuring out […]
“The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or […]
“‘It has always seemed strange to me,’ said Doc. ‘The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of […]
“It was good hunting that day. He got twenty-two little octopi. And he picked off several hundred sea cradles and put them in his wooden bucket. As the tide moved out he followed it while the morning came and the sun arose. The flat extended out two hundred yards and then there was a line […]
“The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into […]
“Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept […]
“Doc is the owner and operator of the Western Biological Laboratory. Doc is rather small, deceptively small, for he is wiry and very strong and when passionate anger comes on him he can be very fierce. He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth. […]