Words&Dirt

“The main difference between human beings and other animals when it comes to superstition is that other species abandon the silly behavior almost immediately once they figure out that it doesn’t actually work.”

––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 244

“He got home and looked though the mail, and he had driven past the drive-through, so instead he sent out for a meatball sandwich, which he ate in pieces, because it was too unwieldy to eat all at once, and even the bread he cut into bite-sized parts.  He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something that he did not understand.  He would never call it God.  He would not call it prayer.  But just beyond his sandwich, and the four TV shows he watched back to back, and his teeth brushing, and his face washing, and his nighttime reading of a magazine, and his light switching off, just the faint realization that there were many ways to live a life and that some people were living a life that was very different than his, and the way they lived was beyond him and also didn’t interest him and yet he could sense it.  Comfort and fear rose together inside him.  Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.”

––”The Doctor and the Rabbi,” from The Color Master, by Aimee Bender, pg. 149