The Pangrammaticon

The little darkness will lift by morning. The larger darkness will pass in time.

The pangrammatical supplement (as knowledge is to power) of perception is expectation. A perception is to a fact as an expectation to an act...

You cannot know a world you cannot change. You cannot master a history you cannot abide. (What we master is never the world but our histor...

There is a reality at the heart of this thing: a body where the person in the mind becomes the ideal.

We can't just say the silence speaks. We have to listen.

There are no secrets in books.

Similar in being what we have because we have it.

Atheism is a form of prayer.

You can live through any given series of events in hope or in despair. These are not alternative hypotheses to be tested; neither hope nor d...

Our courage mystifies us; our cowardice explains us.

Consciousness is rooted not just in the flesh but in our lives. Substrate dependence is not about "carbon" vs. "silicon"...

History depends, not on how passionately we resist, but on how precisely we conform.

Literature teaches us to leave writers alone.

When only a poem can get through to you.

When Hamlet said his "machine" (his body) was "to him" he meant also that he had within him "that which passeth sho...

The truth is a secret that does not need to be exposed to work.

Writing well forces you to be yourself.

When a man dies, we ask those who knew him what they have lost. This interests us and helps us to live. We don't care what those who hat...

What raw experience do poetry and philosophy refine today? To what rough approximation do they bring their precision?

Literature maintains the connection between language and experience. When a poem moves you, you feel the words as words. When a philosophy...