Patrick Sullivan > Recent Status Updates

"[...]while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows[...]"

"She said that we were sick, indulgent. She said we played the most minor notes with the greatest of emphases. She said we loved to dwell on trivia. She said we liked to overanalyze, to look at things too closely. She said that we rotated events like glass prisms that revealed unseen colors when placed in new light. She said that on exposing these new colors we taught ourselves to hate them at once."

"Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our own mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

Finding this way too impressionistic - lost in details of Schama's fancy that often don't seem to hold together in a coherent narrative, and when he tries to tie things together it's just kind of a mess.