Friday 19 February 2010

February 19

The fox and the hedgehog have their domains; but what beast represents the rest of us, who know nothing save our opinions?

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The poetic response to Schrödinger’s thought experiment is to ask: what colour is the cat?

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M’s high standards, his reticence to publish all save the best, the most durable of his writing, makes me feel like a flasher who braves the streets offering a magnifying glass to his victims.

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Sometimes a typo gets to the heart of things. Just found on a green issues blog: “Grab your coast, apocalypse watchers”.

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We declare the person fascinating who listens to us longest.

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Testosterone can make a competition out of anything. Somewhere, probably, there’s a birdwatching club whose first rule is that it mustn’t be spoken of.

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Love has one language but many dialects.

Wednesday 10 February 2010

February 10

An early death is a truncated story. Thirteen years after she took her own life, I find myself wanting to catch up with S. on Facebook.

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When, in the insufficiently distant future, our snouts are plunged into SimWorld and iLove and VR sex parlours, some intrepid beard will stumble with eyes aflame upon this astounding technology: the paper codex.

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In the lost forest of Caledon, I looked up to watch a raven perform its victory spin. Such gratuitous virtuosity! It was raven celebrating raven –– as life asserts its meaning in being.

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Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious.

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What’s blindingly obvious cannot be looked at.

Tuesday 2 February 2010

February 2

Politics may require a fudge but the biosphere doesn’t do compromise. Even if you leap three-quarters of the way, you still end up in the ditch.

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When success eludes us, we learn to take comfort from the consistency of our failures.

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Our last illusions about the solidity of the world vanish when we become parents and realise that the ground we stand upon is ourselves.

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Aliens came to Earth and sought at once a meeting with its most successful species. They are still waiting for the cockroaches to speak.