Archives for August 16, 2016

From 2006:

Few things in life are more disagreeable than coming down with a bad cold when you have three deadlines staring you in the face. The human brain is a miraculous organism, but it doesn’t much care for being asked to generate stylish prose between sneezes. Instead of writing, I’ve spent the past four days watching TV, reading comforting books, sucking down endless mugs of hot tea, sleeping as much as possible, and waiting impatiently for my lungs to dry up.

Among other things, I watched Dumbo, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, and Twelve O’Clock High, which I’d never seen. Dumbo turned out to be even better than I remembered, and the pleasure I took in it was greatly enhanced by the fact that I watched it in the company of a nine-year-old boy whose sense of wonder has yet to be impaired by the onset of adolescent selfconsciousness….

Read the whole thing here.

“They were children, political adolescents. Take a clever boy at sixteen, he reflected, and put him into a laboratory for the next seven or eight years. What emerged inevitably was a materialist, a materialist within an intelligible definition, a man who would assume without question that the methods of science could be applied to human societies. It was frightening how one could deceive oneself.”

William Haggard, Slow Burner