March 28

I ended it, and felt the unassuageable contrition of the gardener who finds two writhing halves of the one worm.

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Oh the irony! We achieve mass literacy and Rupert Murdoch buys all the newspapers.

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If we could reconcile ourselves, truly, to the fact that no one’s watching, what fun we might get up to.

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Even as we read we forget, and what remains to us is not essence but residuum.

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The randomness of suffering being intolerable, humanity invented malediction.

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As we grow older we slow down because we can glimpse our destination.

March 5

If a truth falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound?

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With the fall of the press and the rise of the blog, the age of the hack is passing into history. Now, pace Johnson: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for pleasure.

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The seas are acidifying faster than at any time in 55 million years. We read this and move on. For all our computers, we cannot compute.

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If the internet had existed in Weimar Germany, the Nazis might never have taken power, as their thugs would have been too busy beating up their opponents online.

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The soil of thought is temperament.

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The failure of extraterrestrial intelligence to contact us may well be proof of its existence.

March 2

An insensitive bore is not alone in his vanity. To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imaginations.

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We can only hope by way of contrast that once in a while good comes from our acting with the worst intentions.

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A nag is someone who pursues us with the truth.

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After a time that might have been an afternoon and might have been a century, Lucifer ordered his minions to take down the sign. ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ was an instruction that deprived Hell of its most effective torture.

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To root out clichés is to prosecute ourselves.

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The sometime pleasure of a second glance. What I took, with an inner grumble, for litter becomes a hillside of snowdrops.