Grumps produce the best lists
Whatever your age, the rest of your life is all you’ve got, so it’s worth thinking about. We embrace a core paradox: Though life has no intrinsic meaning, we can and should lead meaningful lives. If you have any hope of living a meaningful adult life, the one vital question is, “How do I live?”
If you already know what “opsimath” means you can skip this one
The doctor fancies himself an opsimath because he now wants to understand things that take 70 years of life to fathom, 70 years of intellectual crop rotation.
Let’s resolve to do it some more
The doctor does not have goals. The doctor has a life and an intention. The latter is to spend as much of the former as possible reading, thinking, and writing.
Dr Essai wishes you a warm and peaceful holiday season
All the best for the holidays, friends, and thank you thank you thank you for reading.
Be happy, don't worry, and don't try to write about it
For reasons that ever elude me, I find it much easier to craft language to convey anger or sadness or poignancy or fear than to convey simple joy.
On Christopher Columbus's diary
Or, somebody's mom just threw out history
When wind and current and vague navigation brought Cristoforo Colombo to
On birds, Low Country sun, and waiting for the sublime
They fly with grace and a lovely sinuous curve of the neck. Then they land like drunken doofuses. As they slow near the ground, they are barely in control of their own bodies, like a cyclist losing the stability of momentum.
An addendum to what the gods do not confer
By this point Gene Kelly could have settled for doing what his adoring public expected — dancing like Gene Kelly for the remaining years of his career. But he didn’t.
On being a gentleman well unread
Why have I read On the Road, twice, but not Jane Eyre or Don Quixote? Why The Thirty-Nine Steps and Three Men in a Boat but not David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice? I’ve no idea.
