Today there are twenty days left in 2020. What are you going to do with those twenty days? The other 346 tumultuous, maddening days of this year are behind us. All that’s left in this year are twenty days and it will be a memory stacked with all of our other memories. So what will…
“If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.” – John McPhee Now and then I re-read that quote to shake myself out of my own head. The implications of that McPhee sentence are profound…
“Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering…
“The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.” It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh…
“I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They…
“We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless…
“A man who lives an intellectual life is like a man who carries a lantern in front of him to light his way. Such a person will never come to a dark place, because the light of his intellect moves before him.“ – Leo Tolstoy I suppose I haven’t reached the intellectual level just yet,…
“The moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember that if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them. There were tides in the…
“Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” – Joseph Campbell Over the last two weeks I’ve found myself reading less, and I feel the impact in…
I confess when I visited Greenwich my mind wasn’t on chronometers, it was on the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time. But after the obligatory pictures at 0° along the famous line that dictates so much of our modern lives I spent the duration of my time exploring the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and listened intently…