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We know that, because of the way the Earth bulges as it spins, the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometres higher than the sea ice at the North Pole. (This bulge also complicates how we think about mountain heights, since the peak of Mt. Chimborazo, rising close to the equator, is actually farther from the center of the plane... See more

There’s such a strong public undercurrent now of what is often called nihilism, but when people say “nothing matters” out of hopelessness, they don’t mean literally that. Ironically, they often speak out of the feeling that something matters, deeply, yet it feels like they can’t protect or even touch it.

Horror, in this sense, is the feeling you get when you see the monstrous. When the knife-wielding killer stabs the hero, an oozing zombie hand grabs your wrist, or the ghost manifests to spook the living. Terror, on the other hand, is the feeling you get when you sense there might be an evil or otherworldly presence.

for all the uncertainty in the world, people are largely humane to one another (certainly in person; especially in person (scale and abstraction are one of the things we don’t handle / process well and are the root of many contemporary issues))

The quest to find a mean sea level for the whole world was part and parcel of the quest to make the world governable. And thus, von Hardenberg writes, did our idea of sea level as a benchmark emerge from a very specific time and place, becoming intertwined with the colonial project and “a long-held perception of holocenic stability.”

Now, on the other hand: since that idea occurred to you, it might be exactly what you should do. Art is weird like that. It could be that you are, in that question, creating a hand that will scratch a certain itch, so to speak.

What is aura, actually? A strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance — this is what it means to brea

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I think what gets stronger for writers is an instinct for when something is or isn’t working and over time you acquire more techniques to fix it. And a lot of that is actually development as a reader.