Sublime

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Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master

While the hyperindividualized nature of curiosity and its interest in orphaned details is of the utmost concern in the ancient and medieval periods, these same characteristics are curiosity’s strongest commendations in the modern period.

and it was Marx who turned them on to Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Foujita. It was Marx, with his love of avant-garde instrumental music, who played Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass on his CD player while Sadie and Sam worked. It was Marx who suggested they reread The Odyssey and The Call of the Wild and Call It Co

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new car