Words&Dirt

“Kornblum told them that his time with Josef had come to an end. He had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his own discipline––which was really an escape artist’s sole possession––had not been passed along. He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains––walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. ‘Never worry about what you are escaping from,’ he said. ‘Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.'”

––The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, pg. 37

“We are better off if the economists speak than if they remain silent. But the theorists cannot answer definitively most of the key macroeconomic questions that concern society, including the optimal amount of fiscal regulation, future income distribution within and between nations, optimal population growth and distribution, long-term financial security of individualized citizens, the roles of soil, water, biodiversity, and other exhaustible and diminishing resources, and the strength of ‘externalities’ such as the deteriorating global environment. The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that businesses and governments have nowhere else to turn.”

––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 215