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.
A book about typographic design that is itself beautifully made: archival paper soft in the hand, the page cut near the golden section. Bringhurst is bracingly opinionated—Times New Roman and most of the nineteenth century dismissed—and his appendices outshine the closing parade of favored fonts. Read slowly, kept for reference; what it left was a sharper eye and the reminder that good typography is invisible yet shapes everything we read.
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.