“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Presently, not far ahead, looming up like a black wall, they saw a belt of trees. As they drew nearer they became aware that these were of vast size, very ancient it seemed, and still towering high, though their tops were gaunt and broken, as if tempest and lightning-blast had swept across them, but had failed to kill them or to shake their fathoml

Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow.

But far worse than all such perils was the ever-approaching threat that beat upon them as they went: the dreadful menace of the Power that waited, brooding in deep thought and sleepless malice behind the dark veil about its Throne. Nearer and nearer it drew, looming blacker, like the oncoming of a wall of night at the last end of the world.

One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason (for the story to make use of)—even a brief description of a road.

What do you want? That’s the question. It is the first, last, and most fundamental question of Christian discipleship.

Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.

When Kafka writes, “Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams…changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” you don’t say, “No, he didn’t, Franz,” and throw the book across the room.

That is me. Unfruitful. And probably unproductive BECAUSE my priorities are jacked up.

But the size and economies of these villages were too modest even to sustain their basic familial and mercantile needs, so the villages would take on collective debt—to pay for fishing nets and supplies, say. But nobody would ever pay back the debt, Clark explained. They didn’t have the money! Instead, it would bind the locals to their village—you