Unfinished Thoughts

A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.

Madness, Rack, and Honey

09 June, 2019

I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...

Crucibles of Mystery

17 May, 2019

After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold—I finally began…

The Experience of the Sky

09 February, 2019

The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…

Looking for the Territory

18 January, 2019

Here’s one of the most wonderful passages in all of Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”:...

Our Recursive World

11 November, 2018

I’ve come to think of almost everything as explainable by some sort of feedback loop. ...

Time As Incremental Loss

07 November, 2018

Loss has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the future. You can’t lose what has already happened; the past is immutable…

“The Absolute and Marvelous”

22 October, 2018

An absolutely lovely passage out of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

The Ontological Status of the Past

19 October, 2018

What’s the ontological status of the past? Is it less real than the present because it no longer exists? Or more real because, in a universe…

Reliving Your Life

15 October, 2018

Suppose the dead can return to the world and be anyone from any era: inhabit the life of a living person, think what they think, feel what…

Borges's Most Borgesian Opening Sentence

12 October, 2018

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I…