I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work...
Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent t...
Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.
For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What’s it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it’s not that many. And then we have a new wo...
Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. Just keep learning, the old woman said.
Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.
But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages,
But it is an orchestra, I say. It’s an imitation orchestra—an orchestrion, an orchestrina—whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you’ve done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act...
Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the nu...
Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.
And with our work, John continued, we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter...
Aldrin cycle
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. —Le
What has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made i...
We all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were t...
The space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, a...
The current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.
The crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you’re doing more than you would be if you were in some sle...