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.
An essay on aesthetics that arrives through the senses rather than abstraction: beauty lives in the gaps—shadow, rest, empty space—and design is only ever the framing of them. The stark East/West national-character frame is wrong; the praise of the gaps is exactly my taste. Less a book to read than one to think with.
Two refusals shape Nasr’s Sufism: a perennialism that is not relativism (all traditions from one source, none interchangeable), and the rule that the esoteric is nothing without the exoteric, no shortcut past shari’a. The Garden of Truth is the Divine Reality where all is One, reached through knowledge, love, and goodness. It found the part of me already drawn to Sufism and left me where al-Khidr does: I search, but I also wait.
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.