Jim > Recent Status Updates

Humans are export destroyers, because we've developed so many efficient ways to kill things off. We slaughter them outright, as we did with the woolly mammoth. We destroy their habitat by turning forests into farmland and paving meadows into strip malls.

... the realization that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression ...

[T]he whole of human history is no more than the histrionics of of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.

Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska's notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of 'the collapse into anarchy,' a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable.

[P]eople were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and —quite rightly—suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrecoverably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with 'the elevating passion of communal action.'

Her eyes were extraordinarily light, a clearer blue even than Valentine's, but as empty as the sky earlier when Maigret had hoped to see the green ray.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

In the end, nearly all our roads lead us to Troy. Agamemnon of Mycenae, Menelaus of Sparta, Diomedes of Argos, Nestor of Pylos, Achilles of Phthia, and Odysseus of Ithaca fought to capture it. Iphigenia was sacrificed to gain fair winds for Troy.

They were never a united nation, they never owed allegiance to a monolithic imperial state like Assyria, Egypt, or Persia. They would not bow their knees to a god-king. They lived in tightly knit separate communities, divided by mountain ranges, yet all were Hellenes, distinguished from the barbaroi--the barbarians who did not speak Greek.

He was a man who lived entirely in the past. He disliked all the fruits of progress that his fellow islanders were beginning to splurge in: motor cars, wireless sets, gramophones, bakehouse bread, Edinburgh beer.

She was more conscious of the motive of avenging her brother's death; but perhaps the motive of which she was most conscious was her desire to wipe out ten years of insults from German officialdom to which [her meek brother] had so mildly submitted.

If you're seeking good times, take care
to arrive on the other side of life intact.
The thing you call happiness in this world
is nothing like true joy.

Here, where the ego blazes like fire,
show me a heart that is truly content.
If you swivel like a compass around the world,
you'll not find a single satisfied heart.

Wanderer of the Road, the Great One does not grant access to everyone. The honor of the Path is bestowed in such a way that not all beggars may enter the Great Door. Our Glory's sanctuary emanates such light that it keeps away the sleeping ones. Souls wait a long time before one in a hundred thousand is granted admittance.

This was another of his habits when he was not feeling well: to lose himself in a novel by Alexandre Dumas père. He owned a set of his complete works in an old, cheap edition with yellowing pages and romantic engravings. The mere smell of those volumes brought back memories when he had been briefly laid up.

At a draftsman's table in this room I compose my novels on a computer, working with hand-scrawled notes; on the wall beside the table I affix maps, plot outlines, hand-drawn likenesses of my "characters," chronological lists. For I am a meticulous plotter of mysteries....

Bingham was in over his head. He had embarrassed Yale, the U.S. State Department, and most of all himself. Fueled by equal parts self-regard and intellectual curiosity, he had attempted to anoint Yale as Peru's archeological godfather as well as ensure a continuous northward flow of artifacts. The goals were naively ambitious, and his reputation was under attack.

Born in 1875, over his 81 years he was variously a professor, writer, pilot, and U.S, senator. Hiram uncovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911; in 1912, he exported its skulls, bones, beautiful ceramics, and precious metal artifacts to Yale.

I did not read newspapers because, as I now know, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me....

At first glance [the dead] seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death diminishes us.

People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don't reach Cold Mountain
even in summer the ice doesn't melt
sunny days the fog is too dense
how did something like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here

We're warriors, and warriors have only one thing in mind -- their freedom. To die and be eaten by the Eagle is no challenge. On the other hand, to sneak around the Eagle and be free is the ultimate audacity.

Awareness is the Eagle's food.

[Don Juan] said that a warrior knows that he is waiting and knows also what he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his eyes on the world. For him the ultimate accomplishment of a warrior was joy.

[Eve Babitz] was on to the alcoholism that she believed killed Quintana. 'They all had drinking problems,' she said of Joan [Didion], Dunne, and Quintana. 'But Quintana's the one that wound up dead.'

Now. the term "groupie" is one Eve [Babitz] assigned to herself. And, in the strictest sense, she was a groupie; which is to say, a woman in hot sexual pursuit of rock 'n' rollers.

"Had a blackjack," Bevan said.
"The authorities don't know that." And then a slow smile drifted across Joyner's mouth.
"He had a blackjack and they'll find it," Cora said.
"They'll never find it," Joyner murmured.
Her eyes began to widen.

He didn't know that his eyes were narrowing. He didn't sense the approach of the invisible reptile sliding toward his mind. The reptile was an idea that touched him ever so slightly and whispered. You need it, you need it bad, and you can't get it here -- but maybe you can get it somewhere else.

Part of the load on her was the seemingly endless word play of those around her -- the concept juggling.

Could it be that we think we know all there is to know about [Rome's great fire in 64 AD]? Who, after all, has not heard the story about the mad emperor Nero setting fire to Rome and then fiddling while the city burned around him, only for him to blame the Christians for the fire and to make human torches of them?

When I was there all those years ago,I was told that people who went there were in danger of going missing. This was followed by a story about a man who ignored everything he'd heard about the area and went there contrary to all warnings. He was never seen again.