"In the long run, reality turns out to be inextinguishable, unreachable.  One can find out more and more about it, but not everything.  Even so, it's advisable to try to find out a little more, because in certain investigations surprises do occasionally occur." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"One loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they've always been there." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"The best thing to do is to travel and to lose all theories, lose them all." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"I must breathe in and breathe out, regularly, steadily, evenly, deeply. . . . In—out—in—out—in—out—that's right!  I'll manage if I go on—I'll get there if I go on." —John Cowper Powys, Porius

Here's the link to our Breathing Circle, the most popular interactive feature on this site.

Author Jeremy Edwards answers the age-old question, "to flirt or not to flirt?"  He backs it up with science and suggests wearing it as a button: "Game theory says I should flirt with you."

[For Jeff Hawkins.]

We stumbled upon the phrase, "When the pyramids were young."  Further research indicated that young pyramids endure their adolescence in small caves:

"There is a little grotto and a cave, and a spring of water bubbling over some rock work, and a juvenile pyramid."
—Edwin Hodder, Old Merry's Travels on the Continent (1869)

Left to right: a newborn pyramid, a juvenile, an adult, and a "great."

"If you take a High Weirdness approach to creativity, you see strange entities lurking in corners behind the work of great artists (Max Ernst is a perfect example of this).  This applies to the sciences as well as the arts, as inconvenient as it may be to the plodders and mediocrities that populate organized skepticism." —Christopher Loring Knowles

Why does humankind still grapple with the greatest questions?  Why can we ultimately know nothing?  And what, then, shall we occupy ourselves with?  All is revealed here:

"I have always been interested in the oddities of mankind.  At one time I read a good deal of philosophy and a good deal of science, and I learned in that way that nothing was certain.  Some people, by the pursuit of science, are impressed with the dignity of man, but I was only made conscious of his insignificance.  The greatest questions of all have been threshed out since he acquired the beginnings of civilization and he is as far from a solution as ever.  Man can know nothing, for his senses are his only means of knowledge, and they can give no certainty.  There is only one subject upon which the individual can speak with authority, and that is his own mind, but even here is surrounded with darkness.  I believe that we shall always be ignorant of the matters which it most behoves us to know, and therefore I cannot occupy myself with them.  I prefer to set them all aside, and, since knowledge is unattainable, to occupy myself only with folly." —William Somerset Maugham, The Magician

"It is characteristic of the imagination to always consider itself to be at the end of an era.  ... But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era.  ... It exists in every civilization. ... [I]n our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically.  ... The apocalypse demands a lack of seriousness.  ... Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety.  Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we're all going to die together or separately. ... In the end ... the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, because actually ... what it offers ... is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of ... something to do in the future." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

Hermann Rorschach was here ... in an index to The Rotarian magazine, 1920.  Granted, we may be reading too much into this.

What a weird experience: my "fundial" doodad (which I discovered via Bernie DeKoven) was kaput, but then I realized that the only moving part was my own index finger.

a hole in something
what a card trick does to fingers

—Gary Barwin, "Because Birds"

To our knowledge, only one person has thoroughly described what a card trick does to a magician's fingers.  With each magical performance, the digitations are aroused to "borrow" or "liberate" according to new yearnings.  Some fingers steal people's secrets, under the delusion that possessing elements of a personal life makes them one's own.  Some steal other people's names, leaving in their wake individuals without any knowledge of who they were, forced to trust in the testimony of friends and relatives.  Some steal time, with the logical intention of prolonging their days; they steal past time when in the mood to dwell upon memories; they steal present time when feeling constricted by immediate limitations; they steal future time out of the very lives of children when hard hit by the panic of impending dissolution.  Some steal dreams, leaving others' sleep blank and uncharacterized.  Some steal sleep itself so as to hibernate like a bear, leaving victims staring, on the verge of despair and madness, night after night in the indifferent dark.  Some steal others' hope, though always leave just enough to keep them from suicide.  We find these insights in Wendy Walker's masterpiece The Secret Service (1992), which we have here paraphrased.

Thanks to Craig Blush and Flavio for the elements of this collage.

When Stephen Hawking hosted a party for time travelers but sent out invitations only afterward, he posited that he'd proven time travel isn't possible because no one turned up.  But perhaps all he proved is that he gives lousy parties.  (Seriously, for such a smart guy, he's a sucker for logical fallacies.)

Now here's a concept, courtesy of the wag (Jonathan Caws-Elwitt):

The New York State Thruway service-area map lists which concessions inhabit each service area. Well, I'm calling them "concessions"... but apparently, in turnpike corporatese, a Starbucks or a McDonalds in a service area is called a "concept." Thus, the map's legend informs us that "24-hour concepts" appear in bold lettering.

So if you ever wake up in the middle of the night and you can't find the insightful paradigm, penetrating theory, or brilliant idea you came up with earlier in the day... maybe what you have there is a concept that's limited to bankers' hours or standard retail hours. (And if the concept comes and goes at peculiar times of day... well, maybe it's operating on a British pub-licensing schedule!)

"There's more to childhood memories than liverwurst sandwiches." —Jeff Hawkins

The exception that proves the rule: the Earl of Sandwich's earliest memories were all covered in seasoned meat paste.

Here in America's oldest city, a common answer to the standard "How's it going?" or "What's new?" is a non-ironic "Livin' the life!"  I love that "Riley" is understood, that we're all-encompassing Irishmen.  (Don't all the best umbrella terms emigrate from rainy climes?)  Granted, Saint Augustine is a quaint seaside village with picturesque harbors and Old European architecture, and its long history makes it unique in the nation; even the circling beam of its lighthouse seems to demarcate a Venn diagram with no overlaps.  But the age-old question in My Dinner With Andre begs itself: is a Himalayan mountaintop (as it were) a better spot for finding one's bliss than one's Lower East Side apartment?  Saint Augustine is one spot among oh-so many on a spinning sphere, so why do migratory Rileys come down to avoid riling up?  It would seem that by collective though technically unspoken agreement, New Yorkers (mostly) have decided that this is the place to escape, thereby creating an Otherworld, a B in contradistinction to A.  Sure, everybody leads a life, in the sense of "hypothetical."  But to live the life is to direct one's own script and also be one's own location scout.  Sure, it's chic to delegate, but Rileys know better.

Pictured: In the foreground, Prof. Oddfellow (Riley is understood) checks the GoPro camera while Michael focuses on a sundial at the center of historic Saint Augustine.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

The text reads: So many mysterious gravitations in me; so few explanations ... [unless you're a butterfly]. —Jeff Hawkins

The text reads: "If I rattle this poem a little I can hear, though still too faintly, the sound of an ocean unfurling itself over a layer of pebbles in many colors. —Geof Huth"

"No one is to be blamed for all this horror except everybody and everything."
—John Cowper Powys, Porius

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Gary Barwin: