I am nothing by myself. I am something only when mixed with others.

A principle of science recently rediscovered.

What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely.

Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker of September 26, 2005.

You must always be careful in the jungle. I listen to my dreams. If I have a dream of danger, then I stay in the village. Many accidents happen to white people because they don’t believe their dreams.

Vajuvi, of the Kalapalo people of the Brazilian Amazon as quoted in the New Yorker of September 19, 2005.

God has given me this swan song to see if I am - to see if I am up to it.

Dr. Minyard, elected coroner of Orleans Parish.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils...

Rebecca West, speaking of Europe in 1937 (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

We prune our minds to fit them into the garden of ordinary life. We exclude from our consciousness all sorts of knowledge that we have acquired because it might distract us from the problems we must solve if we are to go on living, and it might even make us doubt whether it is prudent to live. But sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as time, and we must lift this ban. Then we must let our full knowledge invade our minds, and let our memories of birth crawl like serpents from their cave and our foreknowledge of death spread its wide shadow.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

The woman a man loves is in a sense his soul, or at any rate the answer to the call it makes.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

All women believe that some day something supremely agreeable will happen, and that afterwards the whole of life will be supremely agreeable. All men believe that some day they will do something supremely disagreeable, and that afterwards life will move on so exalted a plane that all considerations of the agreeable and disagreeable will prove petty and superfluous.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is not pleasant to admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the obligation to go on learning even though it involves making acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[W}e live in an uncomprehended universe, and...it is urgently necessary for sensitive men to look at each phenomenon in turn and find out what it is and what are its relations to the rest of existence. (Dubrovnik II)

He offered himself wholly to each event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had to make about the nature of the universe. (Sarajevo VII)

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

You think you'll never get it right,
But you know that you might.

Misheard somewhere.

Carelessness and cruelty ... infects any power when it governs a people not its own without safeguarding itself by giving the subjects the largest possible amount of autonomy.

It seem very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[Mussolini's] offence is that he made himself dictator without binding himself by any of the contractual obligations which civilized man has imposed on his rulers in all creditable phases of history and which give power a soul to be saved.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, "Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone."

Rebecca West speaking about Emperor Franz Josef in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

....

[A} cynic [is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And a sentimentalist…is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

Oscar Wilde, Act III, Lady Windermere’s Fan

The Balkans create more history than they can consume locally.

Saki (HH Munro) as quoted by Lord Burnham

[F]or general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to.


Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car is or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns.

We don't know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why.

Stevan Harnad, "Letters: What is Consciousness?" in the June 23, 2005 NYRB.

[T]rue politeness is a moral quality, whereby the self is abnegated (concealed, Pascal would have said) in order to further the happiness of the group.

Peter France, "The Pleasure of Their Company," in the June 23, 2005 NYRB.

You always won, everytime you placed a bet
You’re still damn good, no one’s gotten to you yet
Everytime they were sure they had you caught
You were quicker than they thought
You’d just turn your back and walk
You always said, the cards would never do you wrong
The trick you said was never piay the game too long
A gambler’s share, the only risk that you would take
The only loss you could forsake
The only bluff you couldn’t fake.

Bob Seger, Still the Same

[A] man is to guard himself against taking a thing in general.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

[R]epublicanism has been revived as a modern ideology. Disillusion with classical liberalism, because it has led to unrestrained capitalism, and with Marxism, because it has resulted in political tyranny, has created a vogue for a “republican” philosophy, with a commitment to effective legal restraints upon the executive, an active ideal of participatory citizenship, and a belief that the collective good should take priority over private interest. Thus defined, “republicanism” appears to be an attractive, nonsocialist alternative to capitalism and globalization.

Keith Thomas, "Politics: Looking for Liberty" in the May 26, 2005 NYRB.

Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I’m Mr Brightside.

The Killers

There is nothing against which an old man should be so much upon his guard as putting himself to nurse.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

I may be a chump in many ways...but I know when and when not to be among those present.

"Bertie Wooster" in Very Good, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse

Bush's Culture of Life

...at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are....there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Theodor Seuss Geisel, submitted by a friend

Do not, however, hope wholly to reason away your troubles; do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed—a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.... Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties fill of pigs and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening... each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil as quoted by the Shakespeare Theatre

Human moments are stolen away by a thousand petty impediments.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

The sicker you get, the harder it is to remember if you took your medicine.

George Carlin

For the black fumes which rise in your mind, I can prescribe nothing but that you disperse them by honest business or innocent pleasure, and by reading, sometimes easy and sometimes serious. Change of place is useful...

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

Harry G. Frankfurt, as quoted in Defining Bullshit, Slate.

...metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly. Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly....There is a universal biological clock..."but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time."

"Life on the Scales," Erica Klarreich, Science News, February 12, 2005

No one ever knows what's next,
but they always do it.

George Carlin

Hell burns within my breast....
I praise and love the one who makes my fire so hot.

Lorenzino de Medici, from Madrigal

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalm 46.10

Rice in a Beggar's Bowl

Of all my thousand choices tonight
I walk into the snowy woods and wait.

Snow rests in peace
on each bough where it has fallen.
The branches are content to bow
like servants with their burdens,
as are all living things content
to wait.

I stand, hands in my pockets,
and let my life fall like snow
in the empty bowl of this meadow;
my mind becomes a slender branch.

My heart settles on the silent earth.

Attend to this moment
until it is enough.

Pastor Steve

The martini according to Wikipedia.

Reading "Uncle Fred in the Springtime" -- very funny.

Try these online intros to Wodehouse:

Some online texts.

Some online quotes.

Amazon.com PG Wodehouse search.

The path of human destiny cannot but appall him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

A man must live, and if he precludes himself from the support furnished by the establishment, will probably be reduced to very wicked shifts to maintain himself.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war — death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.

Chris Hedges, "On War" The New York Review (December 16, 2004).

Like sex, bathing, sleeping, and drinking, the effects of food don't last. The patterns are repeated but finite. Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.

Jim Harrison, "A Really Big Lunch," The New Yorker, September 6, 2004.

If he would just take a plunge (always the Realtor’s fondest wish for mankind), banish fear, let loose the reins, think that instead of having suffered error and loss he’d survived them and that today is the first day of his new life, then he’d be fine and dandy. In other words, embrace in full the permanent period of life, live not as though he were going to die tomorrow but as though he might live.

Richard Ford, The Shore, The New Yorker, August 2, 2004

Wartime Washington

Today the maples are in flames,
The breeze so cool,
I need body armor.
The world is at war,
No truce, no quarter.

The words of an old song
Go through my brain.
How did I get here?
Whose life is this anyway?

Fuck it.
It doesn’t matter.
Today the maples are in flames.
And I have body armor.

GMG

Sky Blue

At 7 am
The sun was barely up.
Three hours later,
The shadows were still long on Rock Creek.
The sky shined a perfect blue,
With a brilliance so true
It juxtaposed
The trees –
Greens, reds, browns and golds
Already a bit of a cacophony –
Showing off the earth’s odd colors.

The artist who painted this picture,
However uncaring of life within the frame,
Set the stage with great beauty.
What more can we reasonably ask
Of any deity.

GMG

A man’s usefulness
depends upon living up to
his ideals
in so far as he can.

A great democracy
has got to be progressive or
it will soon cease
to be great or a democracy.


Teddy Roosevelt

All the exotic ingredients of alchemy – all the metals and minerals and compounds – are in truth one, and that singularity is neither more nor less than the person of the alchemist himself. If the base metal is in need of purification then so, even more so, is he. Out of the corruption and confusion he must find a oneness in which nature and divinity are reconciled. Out of the unstillness of his own impurity must come the transforming power to achieve redemption.

Alan Wall, The School Of Night

October Season

Most trees still have their leaves,
Except for those on the boulevard,
Sickly from the fumes,
The sort the local electric company
Likes to “trim.”

Green leaves too,
With just fringes here and there,
Turning.

On quiet side streets,
Birds were singing
As if still in spring.

Confused about the season?

The squirrels running into the road,
Mouths stuffed with acorns.
They know.

GMG

Water

Sunlight gleaming off the water,
Water where water should be.
A squirrel lies dead on the bridge,
That it gave its life crossing.
A bit of a strange place to die,
Suspended over the water.

Caterpillar

I see the caterpillar on the parkway
Too late.
I swerve.
Think I missed it.
I don’t look back.

Two poems from a bike ride, GMG.

...conducting alchemical experiments...searching for the brightest thing, for something so luminous, even though it was hidden away at the heart of matter, that, should it ever get to be uncovered, it would have made...the sun blink.

Alan Wall, The School of Night

I believe it will always be found, that he who calls much for information will advance his work but slowly.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals, I get my back into my living.
I don't need to fight, To prove I'm right, I don't need to be forgiven.

The Who, Baba O'Riley

Where is the subject and where is the object if you are operating on your own brain? The point is made by the expression “what we are looking for is what is looking.” Consciousness involves a paradoxical self-reference, a ability taken for granted, to refer to ourselves separate from the environment.

Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver for five minutes longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I want is
What I've not got
And What I need is
All around me.

Dave Matthews, Jimi Thing.

Fool: One whom nature has denied reason; a natural; an idiot....A wicked man....One who counterfeits folly; a buffoon; a jester....To make a fool. To disappoint; to defeat.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

When your elevator doesn't reach the top floor,
You have to use the stairs.

ARG

Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.

John Adams, as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

Laurence Sterne, as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly....In the conduct of affairs he may perhaps be able to take so comprehensive a view as to render invention and expedient unnecessary.

Franklin Alexander, describing John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

I am not going to speak to you at all about the justice or injustice of your conduct. I know very well that this word is nothing but noise, when it is a question of the general interest. I could speak to you about the means by which you could succeed, and ask you whether you are strong enough to play the role of oppressors; this would be closer to the heart of the matter. However I will not even do that, but I will confine myself to imploring you to cast your eyes on the nations who hate you: ask them; see what they think of you, and tell me to what extent you have resolved to make your enemies laugh at you.

Denis Diderot in June 1776 to John Wilkes in reference to British pursuit of war to suppress the American colonies, as quoted by Emma Rothschild in The New York Review (March 25, 2004).

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people.

John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

Forget about the reasons and
The treasons we are seeking.
Forget about the notion that
Our emotions can be kept at bay,
Forget about being guilty,
We are innocent instead
For soon we will all find our lives swept away.

Dave Matthews, Seek Up

Concentrate on the real thing while you have the chance.

Bob Shaw, The Ceres Solution (A good SciFi read.)

Lyrics On Demand - for when you need to know all the words.

…the lessons to be learned from Thucydides are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world.

Daniel Mendelsohn, “Theatres of War,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2004

The Nile First Descent Expedition - Pasquale "PV" Scaturro's site

McQuillan walked into a bar and ordered martini after martini, each time removing the olives and placing them in a jar. When the jar was filled with olives and all the drinks consumed, the Irishman started to leave. "S' cuse me", said a customer, who was puzzled over what McQuillan had done,"what was that all about?" "Nothin', said the Irishman, "me wife just sent me out for a jar of olives!"

A martini joke, not an Irish joke: "He said, like James Bond? I said, yes, just like James Bond."

…all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses…are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

A young John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

latitudinarian adj. Not restrained; not confined; thinking or acting at large.

latitudinarian n.s. One who departs from orthodoxy.

From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Consciousness is an interminable yakking, a frantic effort to keep up appearances, to make the game seem always to be your game.

Louis Menand, review of Updike's fiction in the December 1, 2003 New Yorker.

Life is short. The sooner that a man begins to enjoy his wealth, the better.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell

A pessimistic law of history was at work here. Many such mixed communities [as Nagorny Karabakh] coexisted for centuries, not just in the Caucasus but throughout Eurasia and North Africa. And yet they were, in reality, only held together by fear, the fear of what a brutal outside authority would do to them all if mutual tolerance broke down. When the external pressure was removed, whether it was the Caliphate, the Tsardom, the Ottoman or British Empire, or Soviet power, then the current of fear which enforced that mutual tolerance was switched off.

Neal Ascherson, In the Black Garden, New York Review of November 20, 2003.

The John Clare page

Strictly Business by Paul Krugman in the NYRB.

What we think is a gesture of freedom is a symptom of our cage. ...Planets and moons form, and people stick to them because something in the cosmos is trying to keep itself company.

Nicolas Pizzolatto, "Ghost-Birds" in the October 2003 Atlantic Monthly

Everything was okay until he got shot.

Lt. Col. (USArmy, ret.) Larry May

OriginsNet -- the origins of man, religion, art and mind

A credible threat to one's life has a certain bracing effect.

Wife quoting husband.

When and from where [the Sumerians] first settled near the Euphrates was much debated a generation ago, but without any clear consensus. People had settled the region and were growing crops by irrigation before 5000 BC; the best we can say is that the urbanized people who, before 3000 BC, first wrote Sumerian emerged out of this agricultural way of life and tradition without any obvious break.

Timothy Potts, in “Buried Between the Rivers”, New York Review, 9/25/2003

Well I've been out walking,
I don't do that much talking these days,
These days--
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do.

I sit alone on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten,
My friend
Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them.

Jackson Browne, from These Days

Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all.

Jesus said: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Jesus said, "If they say to you 'Where did you come from?' say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established [itself] and became manifest through their image.'

From The Gospel of Thomas as quoted in the New York Review, Oct 23, 2003.

It's time to make new mistakes.

Steve Tomchik

You must not neglect doing a thing immediately good, from fear of remote evil;--from fear of its being abused.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell

Oh a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park
Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark
Or the Chinese dentist Or the British Queen
They all fit together In the same machine

Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many people in the same device

Oh a whirling dervish And a dancing bear
Or a Ginger Rogers and a Fred Astaire
Or a teenage rocker Or the girls in France
Yes, we all are partners in this cosmic dance

Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many people in the same device


Ambrosia, 1975

Listening Wind by the Talking Heads (lyrics)

Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum – which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing – stood in the way of all that.

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

(T)here is one form of centralized government which is almost entirely unprogressive and beyond all other forms costly and tyrannical—the rule of an army....though education and culture may modify, they cannot change [its] predominant characteristics—a continual subordination of justice to expediency, an indifference to suffering, a disdain of ethical principles, a laxity of morals, and a complete ignorance of economics.

Winston Churchill, The River War

All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes, and the atmosphere of the earth seems fatal to the noble aspirations of its peoples. A wide humanitarian sympathy in a nation easily degenerates into hysteria. A military spirit tends towards brutality. Liberty leads to license, restraint to tyranny. The pride of race is distended to blustering arrogance. The fear of God produces bigotry and superstition. There appears no exception to the mournful rule, and the best efforts of men, however glorious their early results, have dismal endings…

Winston Churchill, The River War.

I do not believe that fanaticism exists as it used to do in the world, judging from what I have seen in this so-called fanatic land. It is far more a question of property, and is more like Communism under the flag of religion.

Charles Gordon, as quoted by Winston Churchill, speaking about “fundamentalism” in 19th century Sudan.

What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain—what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable. Yet as the mind turns from the wonderful cloudland of aspiration to the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement, a succession of opposite ideas arises. Industrious races are displayed stinted and starved for the sake of an expensive Imperialism which they can only enjoy if they are well fed. Wild peoples, ignorant of their barbarism, callous of suffering, careless of life but tenacious of liberty, are seen to resist with fury the philanthropic invaders, and to perish in thousands before they are convinced of their mistake. The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by so foul a path.

Winston Churchill, The River War.

Through the desert flows the river—a thread of blue silk drawn across an enormous brown drugget*; and even this thread is brown for half the year. Where the water laps the sand and soaks into the banks there grows an avenue of vegetation which seems very beautiful and luxuriant by contrast with what lies beyond. The Nile, through all the three thousand miles of its course vital to everything that lives beside it, is never so precious as here. The traveler clings to the strong river as to an old friend, staunch in the hour of need. All the world blazes, but here in shade. The deserts are hot, but the Nile is cool. The land is parched, but here is abundant water. The picture painted in burnt sienna is relieved by a grateful flash of green.

Winston Churchill describing the Nile in The River War.

*Drugget – a rug made of a coarse fabric having a cotton warp and a wool filling.

Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts, and silts among the dark rocks of the hills exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit; only it is a fiery snow, such as might fall in hell. The earth burns with the quenchless thirst of ages, and in the steel-blue sky scarcely a cloud obstructs the unrelenting triumph of the sun.

Winston Churchill describing northern Sudan in The River War.

The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing, and consequently knowledge is not generally diffused. Knowledge is diffused among our people by the newspapers.

Samuel Johnson, as quoted by James Boswell

It is so far from being natural for a man and women to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

Samuel Johnson, as quoted by James Boswell.