Fire and Knowledge

Turning the Pages is an online gallery from the British Library that displays rare manuscripts: Leonardo’s notebook, Blake’s notebook, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (written & illustrated by Lewis Carroll), Vesalius’s Anatomy, and more. The “turning pages” interface is ridiculously clunky, but worth the trouble if you are interested.

[Andy] wonders, if they were going down [on the airplane], would the young woman sitting beside him be willing to hold his hand? He looks at her, covertly, wondering. Holding hands, they would go down through the miles of air and crash into their total absence from the earth forever. She catches him looking, lifters her chin a little, and tugs down the hem of her skirt.

“Now you’ve done it!” he thinks. “You’ll have to crash by yourself.”

–Wendell Berry, Remembering in Three Short Novels (2003), p. 204

I belong to a small, unconventional school that believes that no rat poison is the correct amount to spread in the kitchen where children and puppies can get at it. I believe that no chemical waste is the correct amount to discharge into the fresh rivers of the world, and I believe that if there is a way to trap the fumes from factory chimneys, it should be against the law to set these deadly fumes adrift where they can mingle with fog…

–E. B. White, “Sootfall and Fallout” (1956) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 93

I’ve added “Mark Twain’s Rules of Story Writing” as an appendix to “A Guide to Writing Well.”

I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.

–C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947), p. 66

I’ve updated the recommended reading page and added the following books:

• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt – A good defense of free market capitalism.
• Home Economics by Wendell Berry – Good warnings against the biases of free market capitalism and an exhortation to home economy.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck – A mythic exploration of human depravity and freedom.

Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), p. 131

“It is most extraordinary that humans should fly. They have done so only recently, and they do so only clumsily, with a ludicrous hooferaw of noise and fire. Human flight, after all, is only a false and pathetic argument against gravity, which has the upper hand and is the greater fact. All will come down. And some will fall.”

–Andy’s thoughts in Wendell Berry, Remembering in Three Short Novels (2003), p. 201