Since October 2001, roughly in reverse chronological order:
Please come and say the death words over my father...Please advise me on the sale of my shop...Please guide me in my business...I am a long way from the bones of my grandfathers, please help me stay a dwarf...
This was not the time to be a d'rkza. Strictly speaking, most Ankh-Morpork drawrfs were d'rkza; it means something like 'not really a dwarf'. They didn't live deep underground and come out only at night, they didn't mine metal, they let their daughters show at least a few indications of femininity, they tended to be a little slipshod when it came to some of the ceremonies. But the whiff of Koom Valley was in the air and this was no time to be mostly a dwarf. So you paid attention to the grags. They kept you on the straight seam.
'He was talking very excitedly to me,' said the Vicar... 'I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.'
At the opposite end of the machine beauty spectrum, at the farthest point from the austere loveliness of physics and mathematics, you find objects like the great designer Henry Dreyfuss's 1937 telephone. It is not elegant in the way proofs are, or dams; it reflects the work of a designer who was free to draw whatever he wanted, up to a point. Yet the resulting design does not seem arbitrary in the least. Its seeming inevitable rightness is a large part of its greatness. It expresses an underlying technology just as clearly as the dam's shape does.If you make a dam the wrong shape, it will crumble. If you shape a telephone like a Volkswagen or a tomato, it can still work. Some technologies allow greater design leeway than others. But divining the shape that seems inevitable, creating the "inevitability illusion" - the impression that you are looking at the pure visual embodiment of science or engineering - is an art pure and simple, whether you are designing dams or vacuum cleaners.
...everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
'I've often had reason to marvel at the heroism and spiritual valour that people put into causes that seem absurd to many observers. After all, would it have mattered if Sir John had thrown in the towel, admitted he was old, and retired to cherish his gout? Who would have been the loser? Who would have regretted The Master of Ballantrae? It's easy to say, No one at all, but I don't think that's true. You never know who is gaining strength as a result of your own bitter struggle; you never know who sees The Master of Ballantrae, and quite improbably draws something from it that changes his life, or gives him a special bias for a lifetime.
'As I watched Sir John fighting against age... I learned something without knowing it. Put simply it is this; no action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. It's obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?'
On an autumn Atlantic crossing in 1988, in a British cargo ship, we ran into a declining hurricane in mid-ocean. For twenty-four hours, the ship was hove-to, going nowhere, while the sea boiled around us like milk and the wave trains thundered. In the officers' mess, the floor rolled through 75 degrees of arc, and tropical fish spilled onto the carpet from their tank beside the bar."Bit of a windy day we've got today," the captain said from behind his pre-luncheon glass of dry sherry, and the two junior deck officers, stumbling crazily up the sudden hill toward the framed portrait of the Queen and Prince Philip, tried as best they could to nod vigorously and smile, as junior officers must when spoken to by their captain. The radio officer landed, from a considerable height, in my lap. "Oh, pardon! Whoops! Do please excuse me!" he said.
Had the Atlantic Conveyor been registered in excitable Panama, the scene might have been different, but we were flying the Red Ensign, and the more the ocean tossed us around like bugs in a bucket, the harder we all worked to maintain the old-fashioned prim civilities of our little floating England. Every student of the British class system, its minuscule distinctions of rank and precedence, its strangulated politenesses, its style of poker-faced reticence, should get a berth aboard a Liverpool-registered merchant ship in a severe storm.
...
The essence of being afloat is feeling the eggshell containment of an orderly domestic life suspended over the deep. The continuous slight motion of the boat, swinging to its anchor on the changing tide, is a reminder of how fragile is our tenure here - aloft with a novel, coffee cup close at hand, while the sea yawns underfoot and the bear prowls through its dripping wilderness on shore.
Jonathan Raban - At Sea
But it turns out to be possible to come up with a series of intermediate stages leading up to the type of eyes we have: from a light-sensitive patch which can be found on various primitive animals, to a patch of light-sensitive cells, then a patch of cells with a non-transparent backing so that the animal can detect what direction the light is coming from, then this patch bent into a cup for even better direction-finding, then the cup closing to form a pinhole camera so that the organism can begin to see images, and then a lens forming out of any material that has a different index of refraction to allow more light into the eye and form a clearer image. A lot of these intermediate stages are found in primitive animals like barnacles.
But I think my main reaction to the book is something that feels like hope, or relief. Robert Heinlein points out the inherent conflict in someone who loves the works of "nature", but hates the works of humans. Well, I suffered from a bit of that for a long time, because there just wasn't anything in architecture that engaged me. It all seemed so arbitrary. It is a relief to see someone describe what's bad about the we often build now, and how we can do it better. There is a wonderful compassion in a carefully written 1000+ page work that says over and over that the height of a ceiling, the shape of a roof, the placement of a bench in a garden, trees in a public place: that the effects of all of these things on people are important.
"I looked at him nonplussed. I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy that they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets."
