Citations
"The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality."
Ohio. Tonight the sun sets at 5:20pm, and I’m still thinking about my soul. Goodness. What does it mean to be a good person? Sometimes it feels like striving towards a faint light on the horizon that turns to vapor when we draw near. Maybe we punish ourselves
The heat is finally ending tonight. The rain came an hour ago, and C. says it feels like a fever’s breaking. News about the climate crisis tends to focus on high temperatures, not the lows. But since the 1990s, the average nightly temperature has been rising faster than the
When I consider the man I want to become someday, I often picture myself as someone who prays. I have no idea why this impulse is so persistent or where I would direct my prayers or why I haven’t yet become this man. But I enjoy imagining myself climbing
Finished Stephen King’s The Stand today and, even at 1152 pages, I was sad when I read the last sentence, as if a friend had left town for good.
Lately there’s been a great deal of handwringing about “cancel culture” as evidence of increasing intolerance, even a rejection of liberalism. Instead of addressing these ideas, however, every essay on the topic seems to be about things that happened on Twitter. Maybe I’m being dense, but doesn’t
Lately my nights have been filled with patchy dreams and idiot head chatter. Garbled headlines and pandemic waves. American hallucinations and the Sturm und Drang of digital living. Last night I forgot how to fall asleep, and I faced the solitude of the three o’clock in the morning mind,
In 1928, the poet Paul Valéry had a vision of the future: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and
Tonight I came across Tolstoy’s three questions, and they feel especially pressing in these overloaded and disorienting days: 1. What is the best time to do each thing? 2. Who should receive my attention? 3. What is the most important thing to do at all times? Tolstoy examines these