Mercy of the Longue Durée
The kindest thing time does to us is forget us—being erased is not the failure of a life but the condition for living one.
Luke Sebastian Scalone
PiazzaPiazza
Thinking that would not survive a dissertation committee.
Essays at every stage, from first stone to standing arcade.
Library
A record of reading: responses, not reviews.
I read it less as science fiction than as a treatise on alterity: the truly Other cannot be reached, and what we seek in the cosmos turns out to be mirrors rather than other worlds. It stayed with me for its ending, where Kelvin reaches out to a wave that envelops his hand without ever touching it. No contact.
Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Captivated less by the plot than by Clarke's attention to a vital, living world and her refusal to resolve whether Piranesi's animist ontology is objectively true; lingered most for its humane, layered picture of a self that protects rather than pathologizes what it cannot bear to remember.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004.
Found Robinson's spare, hedging prose a quiet masterclass in epistemological humility, and her open-ended reckoning with grace, race, and the prairie's lost abolitionism genuinely unsettling; came away thinking that to write like this would be to count a life a success.