The Book of Air and Shadows

Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.

There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.

The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.

He said there are three kinds of history. The first is what really happened, and that is lost forever. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90 percent of the history in books.

Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: this can’t be happening to me.

Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

That’s it?” asked Rob. “It shows how much you know, Rob,” said Nigel. “That’s King Arthur’s willie, preserved in brandy. Now England can be great again.

Tis a penny-tuppence businesse withal, emplaced curiouslie betwixt the bawds and the bears, of no consequence a thynge of ayre and shadowes.

I meant to say, after the war, somehow, despite the Germans and the Russians, we look around and discover there is still life in us. We learn, we make love, we have children. Poland survives, our language lives, people write poetry. Warsaw is rebuilt, every brick, same like before the war. Miloscz wins Nobel, Szymborska wins Nobel, and one of us is pope. Who could imagine this? And so when we make art, this art most often says something more than, oh, poor little me, how I have suffered, the devil is in charge, life is trash, we can do nothing. This is what I mean.

The problem is that I started out to tell a simple story like you used to find in cheap thrillers, the electronic equivalent of the last-gasp message, the cryptic scrawl on the plaster, the note in blood—“ the emeralds are in the p [illegible scrawl]”; or “It wasn’t Har.” And from this arises the plot. But it seems that my life has become mixed up with the story, as was Bracegirdle’s, viz.: Though God did not call mee to stande among the greate still I am a man not a clod & my story bears telling if onlie to holpe in the breding of my sonne: who needs muste rise to manhoode lacking what ever poore model I might have supply’d. So saith Bracegirdle and so say I. To take

Young Charles Dickens started out as a court reporter, and scholars believe that this experience formed the sense of the human drama evident in his novels. Besides which, those novels are nearly all about crimes, mainly of the white-collar type.

Villains are just there, like rust, dull and almost chemical in the stupid simplicity of their greed or pride.

armed, Crosetti found, felt a lot like having a broken zipper on your fly, something that made you feel self-conscious and