Sublime

The integrity of a piece of language, poetry or prose, is a function of its quality; and an essential element of its quality is the inseparability of idea and language. When a thing is said right it is said right, whether in prose or poetry, formal discourse or cursing the cat. If it is said wrong, if it lacks quality, if it is stupid poetry or

Joan D. Vinge wrote about a demarchist society in her enjoyable pacey novel The Outcasts of Heaven Belt.

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

I reread Ursula Le Guin’sEarthsea quartet, her ideas about shadow selves, our fears, running away, then turning and hunting down what terrifies us made perfect sense to me. Her Earthsea is another world, perfectly delineated in a map I studied again and again. Years later I read how and when she had created those maps: in her kitchen, on a roll of

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.