John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

The McCarthy trials and the Salem Witch Hunt’s — both examples of a very American sort of parity check, designed to find and purge any and all primes inter pares.

As I’ve done for two years now, I’d like to thank Harek for being the best friend I could ever ask for. Even though we almost never find the time to talk anymore, I have not once doubted that our friendship is still something sacred.

Time flies and it’s flown away with me this time. All my good intentions taken out by my absent mind. Apologies are far too small when in them arrogance stands tall, so let me throw away my pride, because I have nothing to hide. This is our fight, side by side, reaching out to make this right. No matter how small the chance or how great the task I will try; no matter how long the fall or what’s at stake I’ll aim to fly. Because you’ve shown me what it’s like to live, nowhere to look but up, nothing to hold back, everything to give. Your friendship means the world to me. Maybe we’ll never lose this. Maybe time will make us into memories, but one thing is true, in the end we’ll be glad we gave all we had.¹

1. With Honor : Heart Means Everything : Milwaukee↩

Whenever possible, a writer should avoid allowing the same word to be repeated twice in a row within a single sentence, unless the writer intends to produce the rhetorical effect of geminatio. Sentences that contain phrases like, (a) “I think that that is not true,” or, (b) “these strings differ at at least two different locations,” are confusing upon the first reading. Avoid this construction whenever a clearer sentence can be constructed by using different words or rearranging the sentence syntactically.

The belief that human life is sacred in the abstract often has the effect of degrading the lives of flesh-and-blood human beings in practice.

Tourism, n. A degenerate form of colonialism, in the way that Spanish is a degenerate form of Latin.

It would likely not be such a problem that man is alogos if only he were not also anomos.

In our society, you may always say insulting things, so long as you do not make it clear whom you are insulting.

I just received my new 1 TB external hard drive in the mail. It cost $330 dollars.

Looking at it, I realized that I am old enough that the hard drive I now use with my computer is more than 10,000 times larger than the hard drive in the first computer I had as a child.

If only there were but one other area of human activity in which things were 10,000 times better than they were when I was born.

I should like to meet anyone who has ever felt, if but for the briefest of moments, that the stars in the night sky are really tears in the canopy of this world — and that, with resolve and perseverance, one might succeed in clawing one’s way out of this world through them.

Perhaps he so easily trusts because he does not truly trust at all, but simply suspends disbelief.