“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,––that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from […]
“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all […]
“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness […]
This is definitely not a book I would have come across had Mr. Detzner not offered me an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review. It’s fun to get an early look at a new piece of fiction, but this short story collection struggled to capture my attention. I spent more time thinking […]
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of […]
“In the desert, you have to walk a long way to see your own reflection.” ––Beasts: 16 More Weird Stories, by Brendan Detzner, loc. 206
John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots is another addition to the growing stack of books designed to help us think about the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies. Markoff offers a detailed history of artificial intelligence and robotics, and attempts to show how past trends are […]
“There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. […]
Very few philosophical novels hold universal appeal, and this one doesn’t break the mold. I truly enjoyed Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. The story follows two women living in close proximity: Renée, the middle-aged concierge of a French apartment building, and Paloma, the precocious and suicidal […]
“What do these onlookers see as they bend over my broken body? I do not know. But inside me, the sun.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 320 “In an augmented reality world, the ‘Web’ will become the space that surrounds you. Cameras embedded in the glasses will recognize the objects […]