glue

Nationalism: the happy accident.

Wholphin

We love artists because we love abuse?

line shaft

Power, as such, is beautiful.  But it gets applied ugly.

history lesson

Eventually, the nerds take over.  They don't always win - others do that - but then the nerds take over.

choice

There's a good argument to be made that contraception is the pivotal development of the last century.

manual labor

As I walk to work and pass the 3rd Avenue cinema, the sanitation man heaves a garbage bag into his truck in the nick of time - the bag was ripping and a split second later would have burst onto the street.  As it was, there was only a little spill.  As I pass by, I see the glint of morning sun on snippets of movie film, cuts of cellophane against sidewalk grit, frames speckled with coffee grounds, sprocket holes and commuters.

be there

The most unpleasant boss I ever had made one of the most useful observations I ever heard.  "Derek, you know they say that possession is nine-tenths of the law.  I've found that's about true.  And I've found something else: presence is nine-tenths of possession."  And, over the years since, I've found that to be about true, too.

dive

At an ordinary club, the price of admission is belonging to it.  And that's steep.

glories

Fanny and Alexander: Grandmother Ekdahl's delight as she receives a Christmas present from her old lover, the Jew Isak, and their furtive kiss.

elements

What could be more natural and perfect than applause by an audience at the end of a play?  Wordless, massive, happy, popular.

primitive

There is an elemental sensation - a falsehood but truly with each of us - that the world is against me, personally.

To All Secretaries

Nobody wants to hear about your minor food intolerances.

Yogi

Simultaneous is a relative term.

Wun

There are friends whose loving errors about me I have come to cherish, as shadows cast by my personality against the light of their affection.  And the stronger the light, and the more direct the love, the more exactly opposite those mistakes of me are.

overheard

At a nice midtown bar.

He to her, without audible irony: "I'm sort of a Christian Grey type."

I sneak a peek at him a little later, and he's just your usual middle aged professional: slight paunch, ordinary dress shirt.

Doofus.

Paris 5

Arts et Metiers.  The beauty of instrumentation, standard meters, Lavoisier's laboratory.  The drama of production, the expansion of possible colors of porcelain, the rolls of punched paper that drive a loom to produce patterns in silk.  Nautical clocks - their progressive designs alternating between greater isolation from the elements and improved sturdiness of the internal mechanism.

substance of hope

Faith is a special form of stabilized desire.

prosecutorial

A government of laws and not of men is not, thank God, a democracy.

whither

What are you tending to?  Answer that clearly in both senses and you will be well.

attraction

The beauty of weakness is the weakness of strength.

lessons learned

In the annals of corporate incompatibility, Southern US companies and Korean conglomerates rank high.

Paris 4

Centre Pompidou.  I don't expect cohesion in a general collection, and this is a general collection of modern art.  Yet the theme is there, and it is illusion.  Spotlights in a pink fog form a pyramid.  Threads in multiple planes form shapes that dissolve.  A lightbox projects lettered shadows.  A magnetized canvas holds an iron rod depending from a string in thrall.  And, above all, the building itself, its decorous exterior actually service structures.

Paris 3

Napoleon's Sarcophagus. Megalomania in life became fear - in all its senses - in death, and Napoleon's tomb is the embodiment of the richest fear.  The giant red form, plain and heaving, like an ocean wave.  He is there, but not at rest, and not being so, disquiets the people.

Paris 2

Flying buttresses.  We love to be fooled because we know the truth.

Paris 1

The Arc de Triomphe.  Megolomania above, small flame of consecration below.  Too small.  The arch of inscibed names and him, Napoleon, insults the flicker of the unknown below.  The four feet of the arch seem that of an elephant and we, the anonymous tourists and the unidentifiable dead, the field mice atrampled.  But burn on, sad light, and let the monument settle, as all monuments do, into mere thing of public art and no memorial to the forgotten names inscribed.  Eventually, every stone pile is a pyramid: a weathered shape and nothing more.

More Paul

Apparently LBJ once told Lady Bird that "the richest inheritance of any son is his father's friends."

up

The profusion of books and widespread literacy are a kind of technical adoption.  I spend enough time in Chartres Cathedral and wonder whether books, like newer technology, didn't dumb down humanity.

Paul

Political and formal social equality are great goods, but they frustrate any ambitious person who mistakes these for a promise of situational equality.  There are the well born, and always will be.

queue

Imagine a thin, upright tube filled with water.  Then a bubble of air, working from bottom to top. Then focus instead on the water, working its way down, around the bubble of air. That is the way a halting line of people advance.