“The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless.” ––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 79 “Starting from rudimentary replicators, evolution produced increasingly ‘advanced’ organisms, including creatures with minds, consciousness, language, and reason. More recently, cultural and technological processes, which bear some loose similarities to […]
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history––his home––the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, […]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exceptional novel by a very smart author who doesn’t know when to shut up. Michael Chabon’s prose is densely literary, rife with cultural references, and brimming with insight and passion. Kavalier & Clay’s 600+ pages read like the internal monologue of the hyperactive lovechild of a […]
“When he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum’s dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained […]
“A great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn. Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at […]
This is probably my favorite of the books I’ve read by Edward O. Wilson, although it did not alter my worldview as profoundly as On Human Nature did when I read it back in early 2012. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is an eloquent explication of the ideas and dispositions I hold in highest regard. […]
“In some domains, quantity is a poor substitute for quality. One solitary genius working out of a cork-lined bedroom can write In Search of Lost Time. Could an equivalent masterpiece be produced by recruiting an office building full of literary hacks? Even within the range of present human variation we see that some functions benefit […]
“It made his heart ache to look around the vast expanse of the fairground that, not very long ago, had swarmed with flags and women’s hats and people being whizzed around in jitneys, and see only a vista of mud and tarpaulins and blowing newspaper, broken up here and there by the spindly stump of […]
“A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not […]
“Freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.” ––The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, pg. 131 “For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendental belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The […]