Jim > Recent Status Updates

For his part, the narrator of Herman Melville's MOBY DICK sees Lima's mist as one of a series of manifestations of an evil associated with whiteness: Lima is a city which 'has taken the white veil,' draping itself in an atmosphere of melancholy which makes it 'the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see.'

The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895.

To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-coloured pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men.

It was a perpetual grievance of his, this practice of his sister's of collecting literary celebrities and dumping them down in the home for indeterminate visits.

Edouard Drumont: "In reality, Jews—these Moderns, these ultra-civilized people with their excesses, their fevers, their constant hungering—wreak more havoc wherever they go than Goths and Vandals.

The important bthing about popular heroes is not so much their own intentions but the picture of them that people create in their own minds.

It was France's misfortune and originality, a journalist observed in 1861, that since the Revolution every form of government as a usurpatory improvisation by one camp or another.

All that chasing after empty things -- conspicuous consumption, bigger houses, more expensive cars. They hardly even speak proper Icelandic any more. They hang out in junk-food joints, getting fatter and fatter. I don't think it's the Icelandic way. We're all drowning in bad foreign habits.

I stop on a rock outcrop for lunch. While munching greedily on a sandwich ... I become conscious of the gentler feeding rhythm of the llamas. Most of the long necks are bent to the ground, but one or two are always lifted for a brief, wary perusal of the surroundings. As soon as one neck falls another rises, quickly but without haste, as if by a consensus of rotation, It's rather like watching the hammers on a piano.

The Incas, who had no concept of progress, planned for eternity.

He told the boy stories of great deeds, great battles, and many of the fairy tales currently extant. He gave him at first carefully doctored but ever more accurate interpretations of the political atmosphere of the palace. And again and again, ever more positively, he insisted that being born a mutation was something different and special and important.

THE LOVERS They stand between the Eden trees; winged Love hovers overhead while Knowledge lies in serpent coil upon the ground

THE MOON Beneath her cold light howl the dog and the wolf. And creeping things crawl out of slime.

Yellow birds laid siege to me. Last night I had to combat a fresh invasion of army ants in my cabin; they overran me with their larvae, but they were easier to fight because they were so unusually large.... Our work is not compatible with nature Amazon style.

Lucki had worked out a pitiless document in which all the eventualities were calculated down to the penny; even the unthinkable was expressed in numbers. But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.

But if I didn't learn anything else at the Military School, I learned the importance of discipline. Without that, everything breaks down, everything falls to pieces. Why is our country the way it is? Lack of discipline. Lack of order. The only part of it that stays strong and healthy is the army, because of its structure, its organization.

Everything's done halfway in Peru, and that's why everything goes wrong. The soldiers we get are filthy, they're crawling with lice, and they're all thieves. But you can beat some civilization into them. After a year in the army, the only thing Indian about an Indian is his looks. But it's the opposite with the cadets, they go from bad to worse.

Then she faced him, Suddenly he realized that the face he had pictured so many times in the Academy was not as soft, as gentle, as the face he was seeing now, the face he had seen at the Metro [movie theater], or at the door when she said goodbye, a timid face, with such timid eyes that she would not look at him.

THE WORLD - Within a circling garland a girl dances; the beasts of the Apocalypse look on.

It was the last day of summer, and the sky over Lima, after burning like an ember for three months, was ash gray with clouds, as if this were the beginning of a long dark dream. They came from all parts of Peru. They had never seen each other before but they were all together now....

The world, as the Aymara see it, is not a happy place. It is hostile and dangerous and cruel. Demons fill it -- demons who steal children, destroy crops, kill farm animals, drive men mad. A God extending peace and love has little chance against such adversaries. Better to rely on the magic that served their ancestors.

A werewolf is a true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire.

I believed that war is Man's supreme aesthetic experience and that only the Germans and Japanese understood this. Only they understood the texture of war: It was unthinkable to fight on the other side. Not that I or my friends expected to win.... We fought, in fact, to lose. Aesthetically, it is always safer to lose.

Hands rose and sank about him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head, while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle tightly drawn. At last about his very throat there ran a soft and silken touch which ... he understood to be a cord of sacrifice -- and of death.

Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of impending disaster hung over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked in the corners of every room. It was a house haunted, really haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous.

Fragments. Two weeks on the Rio Camisea. Upon returning to Iquitos, I found the little bookshelf in my cabin encased in a termite mound; I had to peel the few books, the radio, letters, and journals out of the hard coating, and the most recent journal, which was on top, has been devoured, except for the cover, which is covered in plastic. One passage is left: "...broods a storm. Hate is seething over the rain forest.

He had come in answer to her call, and he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive. "To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!" they cried. "On to the Witches' Sabbath!"

[O]n the dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As a rule they speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful personality they may last a long time.

The Big Bang theory and the explosion of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 200,000 light-years away are simply two items of news in the media, sandwiched between reports about an armed gang's attack on a local post-office, massacres in Burundi or a tremor on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

I found a very bad omen, one of the worst. My book nailed to a tree in the pine woods had fallen down. I had decided that the nail rusted away and the book—it was a little notebook of our father's, where he used to record the names of people who owed him money, and people who ought, he thought, to do favors for him—was useless now as protection.