Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks is a highly stimulating read from my favorite living author. This collection of essays and short fiction sheds light on Stephenson’s personal background, writing methods, and modes of information synthesis. As always, we are treated to a very special version of the world––one seen through the eyes of an author who […]
“We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire. We haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 132 “Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop […]
“Everything speaks in its own way.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 123 “A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, […]
“Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. Endless, would it […]
“‘Shakespeare said it best,’ Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at the lumpish, misshapen head. ‘Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.’” ––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 873 “Choose any person in the world at random, […]
“The center of identity is constructed of those stories we tell ourselves––the poems and philosophies, memories and mythologies and scientific explanations––and the ten thousand things remain always beyond them. Seen at its most fundamental level as generative ontological tissue, that elsewhere beyond our stories is what Lao Tzu called ‘dark enigma.’ To see landscape, the […]
“The more clearly I attend to things, the more clearly they vanish into me. The Cosmos is all dragon, all generative transformation driven by a restless hunger, and perception shares this dragon-nature, as does any other dimension of this being I am: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, they all keep relentlessly appearing and evolving and disappearing […]
Wendell Berry is an author I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. As a staunch defender of the environment and nonindustrial agriculture, Berry challenged my parents’ generation to think twice about the price of American modernity. This collection of essays from the 1970s and 80s does just that, and in much richer […]
“‘I understood in a moment of stillness,’ Litima read. ‘Those candle flames were like the lives of men. So fragile. So deadly. Left alone, they lit and warmed. Let run rampant, they would destroy the very things they were meant to illuminate. Embryonic bonfires, each bearing a seed of destruction so potent it could tumble […]
“One cannot maintain one’s ‘competitive advantage’ if one helps other people. The advantage of ‘early adoption’ would disappear––it would not be thought of––in a community that put a proper value on mutual help. Such advantages would not be thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine […]