Sublime

Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a very small share of the global population now engages in delivering civilization’s energy and the materials that comprise our mode

“Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just starting to learn how to see.”

I delight to come to my bearings—not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may—not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.

Winter, with its inwardness, is upon us. A man is constrained to sit down, and to think.

Overnight I had gone from monster to cliché.

as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.

an eloquent awareness of the human vicissitudes, the raw edges of even the most ordinary day.