Exhalation: Stories

Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

Brahman Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they are strengthening the building blocks of reality.

Set up a rack of billiard balls and execute a flawless break. Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine c

He published papers on number theory and lectured at Cambridge until his death in 1918, during the global influenza pandemic.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different fo

We spoke for more than an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn,