“For the Vinny Costellos of the world, love is bullshit they murmur into your ear to get sex. For girls––me, anyway––sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 70 “‘Power is lost or won, never created […]
“Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers––though they do take superlative and meticulous notes––but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be […]
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the […]
“Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuition […]
“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a […]
“I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail […]
“The facade of a grand building rises gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing […]
Prefatory Note: This essay constitutes a new experiment for words&dirt. I’ve recently been inspired by some of my readers, as well as an excellent interview with Maria Popova, to write a reflection on my last year of reading. Many book enthusiasts use the New Year as an opportunity to create “Best Of” lists, but I’ve […]
“Dr. Geffard teaches her the names of shells––Lambis lambis, Cypraea moneta, Lophiotoma actua––and lets her feel the spines and apertures and whorls of each in turn. He explains the branches of marine evolution and the sequences of the geologic periods; on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of […]