Green

The dark green tongue-shaped wedge of each tree against the twilight.

The grassy odour of olive oil.

A swimming pool, ten metres across, filled, it seems, with green tea.

The breeze tackles him like a footballer, burlies against him, tries to knock him over. His hair flies but his legs are set firm. Like a tree he thinks. He thinks; green. Impossible to strengthen green to green. He thinks.

Inerrancy

A problem with 'religion' is the profound, structural difficulty it has shedding its own mistakes. In this respect at least, science is much better positioned. And this is the particular--relatively little discussed, it seems to me, but vital--upon which the future of religion hinges. This is why homosexuality is such a crucial issue for the big monotheisms at the moment. Not because it is inherently important, for it isn't; but for cultural and historical reasons it has become a major blot in the cultural discourse of religion. It's axiomatic that the condemnation of consensual homosexual sex, or of a homosexual orientation, is, simply, an error. The extent to which Christianity and Islam persist in this error is the index of their pathology. Finding ways of moving religion past its mistakes may well be the great challenge of the age. Inerrant is one of the most terrible terms of dispraise in the lexicon, though often taken otherwise.

Herzog

Self-reflexively, re-reading of Bellow's Herzog (1964) makes me a little uneasy about a blog such as this ... which is to say, leads me to wonder whether blogging these sorts of apothgems, daily doesn't constitute a sort of Herzogification. A manner of Herzogging. Evidence of a man gone Herz-a-gogo. On the other hand, it has also caused me to wonder why it takes Herzog so long (the sorts of lengths of time Bellow stipulates) to jot down the rather sparse epistolary fragments he includes in the novel. Ah well.

There are also strangely misfiring grace-notes. 'Beauty is not a human invention,' the novel says; but not only is beauty a human invention, it may be the only human invention--since wheels-and-axles and writing predate humanity.

Breakfast

You can't skip breakfast. It's an impossibility. Whichever meal you next eat will be the meal that breaks your fast.

Erections

Craig Raine argues that the appeal of erections is in their subjectivity: 'This is how erections feel--larger than life. That is why men like them. They enlarge us.' [TLS 23 Nov 2007, p.3]. But ... really, though? The same might be said of eating an excess of pastries. 'Look at my flabby belly! How wonderful it is! It enlarges me!'

Smoke

We're all smoke, eventually. It all depends on the timescale.

Radiation

The thing that puzzles our souls about radiation poisoning is the way the very word contradicts its message. We are deeply habituated to think of poison as a product of darkness, of dirt and putrescence, of secrecy and shadows. But radiation is a form of light, and it is very hard for us to think of light as poison. (Light can blind, of course; and it can of course burn; we know that; we comprehend that; it correlates to our sense of its essence. But poison us?) What is more alarming than the thought that poison can radiate?