There is a particular grief in abandoning a book halfway through — not the grief of loss, but of a door left ajar. What does it mean to carry a half-read world inside you?
Continue Reading →A history of deliberate intellectual self-destruction, from the Alexandrian fires to the bonfire of the vanities — and what it tells us about the relationship between knowledge and power.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But what lives in that silence? A meditation on the limits of language and the eloquence of the unspeakable.
From Piranesi's etchings to the modern ruin-porn of abandoned factories, our fascination with decay is not morbid — it is deeply, essentially human.
The annotations we leave in books are a form of self-portrait. What do the underlinings of dead scholars tell us about who they were — and who we are?