June 2025

"Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do... go back to move forward." Since the Judgment of Paris, we know apples can spark discord and ignite war. Chevalier updates the myth with tragicomic flair...

"Everything exquisite ripens slowly." — Schopenhauer. 2006-2016: today this blog turns ten. What surprises me most isn't that I kept at it this long, but how fast the time flew.

"I don't worry. When I can't change things, I don't think about them. If I can fix them, I do and then I forget." Rural England, 1830. Mary grew up on a farm where life was brutal...

"When we see something, anything at all, it's no longer what it was, and neither are we." Dream or reality, magic or illusion, miracle or mirage: can you truly separate fantasy from reason?

"Well, now we understand each other; now you know I have a heart, one I haven't always been able to control, like some others." This hefty Victorian novel boils down to one sentence: Frank loves Mary...

"Our relationship with books isn't this continuous, homogeneous process some critics make it out to be, nor a place of transparent self-knowledge, but an obscure space haunted by memory fragments..."

"What defines madness is solitude — but monumental solitude. A solitude so vast it doesn't fit in the word solitude, something you can't even imagine unless you've been there..."

"I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving; O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied With a single thread of my own hand's weaving..." — Keats. Leonora, attractive and forty-something...

"A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it isn't open." — Frank Zappa. Lily of the valley and lumbago / Fake vacation / Two weeks left to finish my homework / Hyperconcentrated, chained to my computer...