Wind, Sand and Stars

Wind, Sand and Stars

They are not searching for us yet, or, to be more precise, they are searching elsewhere for us. Probably in Arabia. And in fact we shall hear no plane until tomorrow, after abandoning our own. And that single distant flight will mean nothing to us. Black specks...
Landmarks

Landmarks

I am wary of the dangers of fetishizing dialect and archaism – all that mollocking and sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of being seen to advocate a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name,...
Delta of Venus

Delta of Venus

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger,...
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

The Most Beautiful of Theories In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not “wasting” time—something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget. He was in Pavia. He had joined his family,...