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April 10 - July 1, 2023
The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think.
The houses are mostly of wood, and so are the churches. Spaniards would have built a single great cathedral here, of stone, with gold on the inside, but the colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable from barns, each no doubt preaching that all of the others have it wrong.
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“But wasn’t it all stupid nonsense, rot, gibberish, and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?”
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The sun had been rolling along the horizon for hours, like a fat waterfowl making its takeoff run.
white hair clamping the back of his head like wind-hammered snow on a tree-trunk.
his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns,
True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”
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Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
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the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: haul-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails on the jawbone and temple, tugging at the corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line.
Ha
because it was inherent in human nature that one must from time to time give things away, and at such times, one needed someone to give things away to, and part of being a good friend was to be that someone, as needed.
Paris was a city of stone, the color of bone, beautiful and hard—you could dash yourself against it and never leave a mark. It was built, so far as Jack could tell, on the principle that there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years.
It was disconcertingly like working for someone—just the sort of arrangement he’d given up, long ago, as being beneath his dignity. It was, to put it more simply, too much like what Bob did. So Jack had to keep reminding himself that he was not actually doing it, but pretending to do it, so that he could get his horse ready to sell—then he would tell these bankers to fuck themselves.
Haha!
gradually fallen from favor, as she has grown fat and histrionic,
Ha
“I am annoyed. I admit it. But that is not as important as what you do next. If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.”
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something happened like that which happens to those who read novels which please and make the same impression as true stories.
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People who are especially bad, and know that they are, such as Father Édouard de Gex, may be drawn to religion because they harbor a desperate hope that it has some power to make them virtuous—to name their demons and to cast them out. But if they are as clever as he is, they can find ways to pervert their own faith and make it serve whatever bad intentions they had to begin with.
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I have come to the conclusion that the true benefit of religion is not to make people virtuous, which is impossible, but to put a sort of bridle on the worst excesses of their viciousness.
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fearlessly spoke the truth that was in my heart, and said what everyone else was secretly thinking, but too cowardly to voice.
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Oh, well (she thought), if the world were populated solely by persons who loved and desired each other symmetrically, it might be happier, but not so interesting.
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Then they moved on, a thicket of legs and a storm of reins, black against the fresh snow, which muffled the sounds of their passage and swallowed them up, leaving nothing for a painter to depict except a blank canvas, and nothing for a writer to describe except an empty page.
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This was the closest he’d ever come to having a purpose in life (supporting his offspring was tedious and unattainable),
Ha
horripilation
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He’d lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men’s stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.
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This a playful dig at the Cockney manning the oar. If Daniel had made the same jest, he’d have been pitched overboard, and the waterman would have been acquitted, at the Old Bailey, on grounds of All Too Understandable Righteous Fury. Somehow Roger said it with the wink that was as good as a one-pound tip.
Haha
People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions.
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which of them were idiots and which merely independent-minded.
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Both men were of an age when they were in no great hurry to make friends and share confidences.
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…whereas here; all, as well Brandy as Wine, and all our strong compounded Drinks, such as stout Ale, Punch, Double-Beer, Fine-Ale, &c. are all drank to Excess, and that to such a Degree, as to become the Poison, as well of our Health as of our Morals; fatal to the Body, to Principles, and even to the Understanding; and we see daily Examples of Men of strong Bodies drinking themselves into the Grave; and which is still worse, Men of strong Heads, and good Judgment, drinking themselves into Idiotism and Stupidity…. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce
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But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That’s how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind.
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Music beckoned: a strange sound on a night such as this. It meant Order and Beauty,
am comfortable with the notion that we are Machines made of Meat, that there’s no more free will in us than there is in a cuckoo-clock, and that the spirit, soul, or whatever you want to call it, is a færy-tale.
horripilation.
the core of Natural Philosophy more than one system for understanding the Universe.
