Logs

185,782 words

Today, Over the Years . . .

Aug 6, 2025
To behold Nature’s majesty is to become aware of my own mortality; to become aware of my own mortality is to feel grateful exist with and witness this majesty.

Aug 6, 2024
An apple a day keeps salvation away.

There is nothing more noble in Nature than a glacier.

Research Barðura, and read the Icelandic saga about him, the half-human-half-troll guardian of Snæfellsjökul.

The author decides when it’s ready to write. The editor decides when it’s ready to read.

I think I might be a transcendentalist.

The primary claim of transcendentalism is that you can transcend yourself by venturing into and unveiling the deepest parts of yourself, and that the main vehicle for your introspection ought to be communion with Nature. All that I believe wholeheartedly.

Explore David Abram’s work, and consider reading his book The Spell of the Sensuous.

And definitely read Terry Tempest Williams’s work, starting with The Hour of Land: A Personal Typography of America’s National Parks.

There is not a more important or valuable skill in life than the ability to hold in tension (1) a feeling of complete contentment with where you are and what you have and (2) your desire for more and better and new.

Maybe the endurance of the Gospels has to do with an Enlightenment, empirical, scientific idea that we all came to value so highly: replicability. Maybe the Gospels have endured so well in Western society because they are plural, not “The Gospel.” It’s “The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: An Interdisciplinary Telling of the Life, Morals, and Miracles of Jesus of Nazareth,” a peer-reviewed study.

Aug 8, 2023
Sometimes characters in film aren’t people. Sometimes, the main character is a concept or setting.

Christopher Nolan does this with entropy, time, and dreams in :

• Tenet
• Interstellar and Memento
• Inception

James Cameron does this with Pandora in Avatar.

Even when these movies have too much exposition, a weak plot, or shallow character development, they still work because they’re depicting things that can only be represented in the cinema.

A movie isn’t just a script. It’s a movie.

The direct contrast to this is Quinten Tarantino. His movies are scripts firsts, then films.

I dream because I am human. I am human because I dream.