The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.

For Evan, ignorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself.

We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch,

It is the possibility of our minds touching that makes writing a worthwhile endeavor at all.

It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal?

“Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a

It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process.