Quote #13: Seneca (65 AD.)

Now let me tell a story. Asclepiodotus writes that a number of men were sent by Philip down an old mine that had long since been abandoned; they were to explore how rich its deposits were, what state it was in, whether past greed had left anything for future generations. They descended with plenty of lights, enough to last many days; then, when exhausted by the long journey, they saw enormous rivers and huge lakes of stagnant water, like our own, not cramped by the earth weighing down on them, but with plenty of open space—and they could not help shuddering at the sight. I read this with great pleasure. For I realized that our generation is struggling with vices that are not new but inherited from long ago; in our day it was not the first time that greed had rummaged in the veins of earth and rock and searched in the darkness for what was inadequately concealed. ose ancestors of ours whom we are con- stantly praising, whom we complain that we so little resemble, were led on by their hopes to hack into mountains, and stood on top of their gain, beneath their ruin. Before King Philip of Macedon there were people who would pursue money into the very deepest re- cesses,and,though endowed with upright, freespirits,would stoop to enter those caves where no contrast between night and day ever penetrated. What great hope made them leave the daylight behind? Human beings stand erect, facing the stars, so what great necessity made them bend down, buried them, and plunged them to the depths of the earth’s interior, to dig out gold that is no less dangerous to search for than to possess? For its sake they dug tunnels and crawled after their grubby, undependable plunder, forgetting the daylight, forgetting the better world on which they had turned their backs. Does the earth lie as heavy on any corpse as it did on those people, over whom great greed threw the weight of the earth,whom it robbed of the sky, whom it buried in the depths where that foul poison lurks? They were bold enough to descend to where they encountered a new natural order: earth suspended above them, winds blowing aimlessly in the darkness, grim springs of water owing for no one’s benefit, and deep, endless night. Then when they have done that, they are afraid of the underworld!

From “On Winds” in Naturales Quaestiones, this English translation by Hine. I hear this passage reverberate in language and theme throughout Tolkien and
“Middle-Earth.” He was, after all, an eminent Classics scholar before he wrote his bestsellers. It is striking just how clearly a short text can affect, color, and shape one’s imagination, and even one’s worldview.


word #13: “chalazophulakes” (n.)


  1. hail-guards

From Seneca:

[…] people who watched out for hail coming. When they had given a signal that hail was imminent, what do you suppose? That people ran for their cloaks or their waterproofs? No, they all performed their own sacrifices, one person with a lamb, another with a chicken. Instantly those clouds turned away, once they had tasted a bit of blood. That makes you laugh? Listen to what will make you laugh even more. If anyone had neither a lamb nor a chicken, as an inexpensive alternative he turned on himself, and, so that you do not think clouds are greedy or cruel, he pricked his finger with a really sharp stylus and performed a sacrifice with the blood. The hail turned away from his tiny farm no less than from those where it had been appeased with larger victims.

Gives some cultural/historical context to the “Chicken Little” tale.

Quote #12: Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1844)



On Waves and Cycles







Quote #11: Elena Ferrante (2015)

The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? Without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing comes out alive and true. It’s not enough to say, as we increasingly do, These events truly happened, it’s my real life, the names are the real ones, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. If the writing is inadequate, it can falsify the most honest biographical truths. Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.”

Quote #10: Anne Carson (1995)

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?

Word #10: “glottochronology” (n.)

n. [Linguistics]

  1. The application of statistics to vocabulary to determine the degree of relationship between two or more languages and the chronology of their splitting off from a common ancestor.

Or, as its conceiver Morris Swadesh hypothesized, “[i]f we can show by means of comparative linguistics that various people spoke similar languages sometime in the past, we can infer the identities of those predecessor languages, and thus even more intimate connections between all human cultures … arriving eventually at an original tongue” (quoted in About a Mountain, 126)


Quote #9: Timothy Morton (2013)

I start the engine of my car. Liquefied dinosaur bones burst into flame. I walk up a chalky hill. Billions of ancient pulverized undersea creatures grip my shoes. I breathe. Bacterial pollution from some Archean cataclysm fills my alveoli—we call it oxygen. I type this sentence. Mitochondria, anaerobic bacteria hiding in my cells from the Oxygen Catastrophe, spur me with energy. They have their own DNA. I hammer a nail. In consistent layers of ore, bacteria deposited the iron in Earth’s crust. I turn on the TV and see snow. A sliver of the snow is a trace of the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. I walk on top of lifeforms. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial outgassing. Oil is the result of some dark, secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind. (58)

From Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.