I have a friend who always asks people for new found wisdom every birthday. I jotted this down when I turned thirty. I recall my early childhood often. The slant of light through a half-open curtain; the soft low of a cow heard while driving by a pasture; a description of country roads in a Chekhov story will each carry my mind to those sultry summer evenings spent waiting at the window of my grandparents' country home for the sun to fall and the cows to return from grazing.

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.

I read 14 books in February, and nothing hit quite the same heart chords as my January favorite The Waves. Scattered thoughts follow. I have been playing video games obsessively the last week and it’s done a number on my reading and writing abilities.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.

I have seen this question pop-up frequently on reddit, so I made a list. This list was spurred by a discussion with a friend that found it hard to pick out well-written science fiction.

This post is a response to Steven Pinker’s article Why Academics Stink at Writing. The first half of his article is worth reading; the rest rambles. I do not have a problem with the premise or the solution Pinker proposes, but parts of the article irked me.

We rely on factual information to guide our lives, but we can only retrieve this information by probing into our memory. Memory is tinged with loss of detail. I am sitting now on my porch writing while a runner passes in front of my eyes.

On July 25, 1966, Paul Celan visits Martin Heidegger at his secluded hut in the middle of the Black Mountains. Heidegger, a known and unrepenting supporter of Hitler and the National Socialist party, was both admired and despised by Celan whose parents died at an internment camp, and whose youth was spent labouring under the hateful gaze of Nazi party members.

The Iliad opens with the anger of Achilles, unjustly stripped of the spoils of war by Agamemnon. He has come to wage war against people he holds no grudge against and for a cause that he does not hold in high regard (Book I 152-160, translation Richmond Lattimore):

Truly the light is sweet, And it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun; But if a man lives many years And rejoices in them all, Yet let him remember the days of darkness, For they will be many.