A Note About These Meditations

They are both literary and mathematical. Each begins with a passage that moved me. Then I've searched for a set of clue words that anagram perfectly to the passage. While some of the clue words are chosen by me, the majority are discovered as a consequence of multiple mathematical constraints: There cannot be more than 26 clues. The passage cannot be longer than 216 characters. The first letters of the clue words spell the work from which the passage is quoted and, where possible, the author’s name.
The clue words, together with the passages, form a set of intensely personal meditations.

CONTENTS

Manguel – A History of Reading

Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

Edward Lee Walker - HINGEs

POINCARÉ · Science and Method

Annie Dillard - The Writing Life

Momaday - The Man Made of Words

Lear - The Desire to Understand

Bruno Rossi - Cosmic Rays

Splinters of Infinity

Harrigan - Sorrowful Mysteries

“Reading has been for me a cartography. I know that on a page somewhere on my shelves staring down at me now is the question I'm struggling with today, put into words by someone who could not have known of my existence.” (1996)

movement 

“I knew I had devoted a good part of my life to it, memorizing poetry and focusing my attention on complexity of rhythm in particular, on force, ....., repetition, and surprise, in both poetry and prose.” (The Writing Life - Annie Dillard, 1989)

anyhow

“Whereas, heaven knows that if I could get out of the mountains of wiglomeration on which my unfortunate name has been so long bestowed (which I can't) or could level them by the extinction of my own original right (which I can't either, and no human power ever can, ...., I believe, to such a pass have we got), I would do it this hour.” (Bleak House - Charles Dickens, 1853)

northmen

“The Vikings knew that if they just remained a separate military elite in Frankish lands, they would be easily cast away when their usefulness had ended. Instead, they conscientiously took French wives, learned the Frankish (and sometimes Latin) tongues, and became patrons of the Church. While the aristocrats of Europe may have been looking down their long noses at these barbarians, the Vikings were busy becoming something new: they were becoming Normans.” (....... : The Viking Saga - John Haywood, 2016)

gherkins 

“.... is a word borrowed from early modern Dutch. In English, ‘....’ first referred specifically to small, pickled cucumbers rather than cucumbers in general, a usage that was well established by the 17th–18th centuries. The sense later broadened in some dialects to cover similar small pickled vegetables, but the core meaning remains ‘tiny pickled cucumber,’ whose resemblance gave the London skyscraper its nickname ‘The ......’”

unwise 

“American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope discovered 1,300 species of dinosaur. He died in straitened circumstances after investing ....ly in silver.” (A Short History of Nearly Everything  - Bill Bryson, 2003)

everything 

“A person’s character has to be rock-hard, for ..... else is built upon it.” (Fathers and Children - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1862)

lost 

“Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was .....”

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. (Inferno, Canto I - Dante Alighieri, c. 1308–1320)

awe

“I don’t think that after the age of ten or so, I was ever really a believer. I might have been ...d by the Latin Mass, but not as much as I was bored and bewildered by it.” (Sorrowful Mysteries - Stephen Harrigan,  2009)

how 

“I wanted to show in a series of city maps, based on all the detail in Peña’s descriptions, what a brilliant exegesis of the social dynamics of these cities he had achieved. My maps showed ... water moved through Djakarta, not just municipal water but also trucked water and, street by street, the flow of rainwater. And ... road building in Cape Town reflected the policy of apartheid.” (The Mappist - Barry Lopez, 2013)

indwelt 

“Paul reminds that they are ‘.... by God’s Spirit.’” (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, c. AD 53–54)

shadows 

“Like ourselves, and they see only their own ....., or the ..... of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.” (The Republic, Book VII - Plato, c. 380 BC)

The Brimful Book

“In 1944 ..... was given as a third birthday gift by Prudence to her grandson Lee.

Owen 

“Move him into the sun—Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.” (Futility - Wilfred ...., 1918)

Ross 

The New Yorker magazine was launched in 1925 by Harold ... and his wife, journalist Jane Grant, with financial backing from Raoul Fleischmann. .... served as the magazine’s first editor until his death in 1951.

yesterday 

“It’s no use going back to ....., because I was a different person then.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, 1865)

octagon 

Santa Maria della Reggia, ‘La Collegiata,’ is an ...al church in Umbertide about 7 miles north of Castiglione Ugolino. Built in the late 16th century in geometric harmony with the broader Christian habit of using ....s for spaces associated with Marian or baptismal themes.

foot 

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil is bare now, nor can .... feel, being shod.” (God’s Grandeur - Gerard Manley Hopkins, written 1877; published 1918)

rot 

“From hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we ... and ...; And thereby hangs a tale.” (As You Like It - William Shakespeare, c. 1599)

excommunicate

“Of all the ‘strange evils and adversities predicted for the century, the effect of the schism on the public mind was among the most damaging. When each Pope .....d the followers of the other, who could be sure of salvation?” (A Distant Mirror - Barbara W. Tuchman, 1978)

awash 

“The world is …. with chemicals.” (Silent Spring - Rachel Carson, 1962)

disappointment 

“Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must … all I endeavour end?” (Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord - Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1889)

inadequate 

“Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, .....” (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Carlo Rovelli, 2014)

noggins

“A knock on the …. was often enough to settle the matter.” (Master and Commander - Patrick O’Brian,  1969)

geography 

“Maps are the most revealing of all texts.” (The Revenge of … - Robert D. Kaplan, 2012)

(Completed at First Light Book Store, December 18, 2025 Austin Texas. Inspired by Frank Walker.)

“The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Man views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”

veto 

the Soviet Union cast its first …. in 1946, blocking Western proposals on Syria in the UN. Over the Cold War decades the Soviets used the ... 79 times

Lolita 

The success of …. in 1958 let Nabokov at age 59 quit teaching at Cornell, move to Montreux, and spend his remaining decades writing and collecting butterflies in the Alps. He had 19 years left to live.

Alcon blue 

the .... butterfly, marsh gentian plant, and Myrmica ant form one of nature's strangest dependencies. The .... butterflies lay their eggs exclusively on marsh gentians. Their caterpillars then drop to the ground where they're adopted by the ants through chemical mimicry, spending the next 23 months in the ant nest before a hasty departure.

detente 

The …. of the 1970s eased Cold War tensions between the USSR and the United States with grain deals, arms limitations, and the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz handshake in space.

incoherence 

Daniil Kharms, the absurdist poet of 1930s Leningrad, made …. into an art form. His miniature stories collapse mid-sentence, characters fall out of windows for no reason, old women multiply impossibly. He was arrested in 1941 and died in a psychiatric prison.

marsh gentian 

Gentiana pneumonanthe, a violet-blue wildflower of European wetlands, blooming late summer in acidic fens and bogs. Its trumpet-shaped flowers open only in sunlight, closing at the first hint of shadow, a plant that requires exact conditions to survive, and even more exact conditions to exist. They are the exclusive hosts of the Alcon blue butterfly. 

iridescent 

butterfly wing scales have microscopic lattice structures that are precisely spaced, often just hundreds of nanometers apart. When light hits these structures, waves reflecting off different layers interfere with each other. Some cancel out (destructive interference), others amplify (constructive interference). The regular spacing of structures acts like a diffraction grating, bending specific wavelengths at specific angles. The color changes depending on the viewing angle and is why .... wings shimmer and shift.

renews 

The garden gate swings shut, no sound of laughter, only August wind that .... its claim on emptiness. I kneel where gentians used to bloom before the soldiers came. (Vyra - Anna Akhmatova)

noted 

In Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, prisoners are arrested based on what informers have ….. A neighbor …. you didn’t attend the May Day parade. A coworker …. your silence during a toast to Stalin. To be …. was to be marked, to have one's coattail caught in communism's lethal  meat-grinder.

ant 

The Myrmica .... species are tricked by the Alcon blue caterpillar's chemical forgery. The ants carry the caterpillars after they've dropped from marsh gentians into their nest, feed them preferentially over their own larvae, protect them during the 23 months until chrysalis.

butterfly 

The Alcon blue ... has a wingspan of barely an inch, a lifespan measured in days. All that elaborate underground deception, all those months in an ant nest to produce a few days in the sunlight, a successful mating, and a few dozen eggs on precisely the right flower. 

October 

The Bolshevik Revolution of ……, 1917 upended the Nabokovs’ world. The family estate at Vyra, his father’s liberal politics, the comfort of aristocratic St. Petersburg - all were lost. They fled to Crimea, Constantinople, and Berlin. Nabokov never saw Russia again.

kitsch 

The seven Gothic “Stalin skyscrapers” built in Moscow after WWII are monuments to socialist …. : wedding-cake towers mixing Soviet monumentalism with borrowed tsarist grandeur.    

orgasm 

“The …. is a petit mort,” wrote Nabokov, “a little death.” In Russian, оргазм is one of those clinical words borrowed from Western medicine, sitting awkwardly in a language that had richer, earthier ways of speaking about the body before Soviet puritanism tried to erase them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

vouchsafe 

Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman ends with the autocratic statue of Peter the Great refusing to …. mercy to the mad clerk Evgeny, who dared shake his fist at power.

stone 

“There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist to learned historian, who does not throw his little .... at Alexander for things he did wrong at this period of his reign.” (War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy)

Pale Fire 

From Shakespeare’s Timon: “The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her …. she snatches from the sun.” Nabokov’s 1962 novel …. is about an exile inventing the homeland he lost.

ebbs 

Chekhov’s The Seagull ends as Konstantin’s hope …. away—the failed writer, the lost love, the sound of a gunshot offstage.  

awkwardness 

Goncharov’s Oblomov spends the entire novel in his dressing gown, paralyzed by social …. The effort of getting dressed, of making visits, of doing anything at all. 

kiss 

“After first giving him a European handshake, he kissed him three times in the Russian manner—that is, he touched Arkady’s cheeks three times with his scented mustache—and said, “Welcome.” (Fathers and Children - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev)

Math 

Plants behave as if they know .....They make use of a Fibonacci twist to set an angle that never quite repeats. Because it never repeats, nothing lines up, and each new leaf finds its own bit of light.

exist 

“If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world ....ed." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard)

mishmash 

.... has biblical Hebrew origins‎ meaning to mix, to scramble, to knead together.

oaf 

Fyodor Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a moral ....: noisy, messy, and oafish in his appetites and behavior.     

ratsbane 

For centuries .... was nicknamed polvere di successione,“inheritance powder”,  because it left almost no trace in the body and was used to accelerate family fortunes.

Yahweh 

In early Israelite tradition ..... was considered so powerful—or dangerous—that it wasn't pronounced. People would substitute Adonai (“Lord”) instead Multiplied over centuries it eventually became “Jehovah” through a medieval misunderstanding.

(Completed December 3, 2025 at First Light Book Store, Austin, TxX. This meditation was inspired by my watching David Attenborough's short video on the Alcon blue butterfly, after which I recalled Vladimir Nabokov's love of lepidoptery. While the Alcon and Nabokov are central, there are inevitable arabesques that the constraints of language and math delivered out of the 'blue'.)

"Sometimes what we’re looking for begins with a faint thread, a shy beginning hiding at the edge of our attention. Like a word that wants to be found, or a stubborn memory that hasn’t quite surfaced yet, or a life direction that’s still forming in the shadows."

East

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” (.... of Eden - John Steinbeck, 1952)

Deaf

“A …. man summoned a …. man to the judgment of a …. judge.” (“Глухой судья” - Alexander Pushkin, 1830)

Wordsworth

“In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; and passing even into my purer mind with tranquil restoration: that blessed mood, in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened: that serene and blessed mood,— until we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul: while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." ("Tintern Abbey" - William ......, 1798)

absentmindedness

“Ilya Ilyich spends whole mornings in his …. on the sofa, turning great plans over in his mind and rising to accomplish precisely nothing.” (Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov, 1859)

Rabbit

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.” (…. Run - John Updike, 1960)

diffraction

“As regards ….., on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we use the wave theory; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays we think in streams of flying energy quanta.” (The 23rd Robert Boyle Lecture - William Bragg, 1921)

lightning

“In 1953 Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks—one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent the Earth’s early atmosphere—connected them with rubber tubes and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for ….. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars and other organic compounds. ‘If God didn’t do it this way,’ observed Miller’s supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, ‘He missed a good bet.’” (A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson, 2003)

entente

“On June 17 Field Marshal von Hindenburg replied: we can reconquer the province of Posen and defend our frontiers in the east. In the west, however, we can scarcely count upon being able to withstand a serious offensive in view of the numerical superiority of the … and their ability to outflank us on both wings.” (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William L. Shirer, 1960)

enormous

“The universe is not only ….. — it is stranger than we can imagine.” (Sir Arthur Eddington)

width

“Here under the window the sturdy burdock creeps out of the thick grass; above it the lovage trails its juicy stalks and the Virgin’s tears fling still higher their pink tendrils; and yonder further in the fields is the silky rye, and the oats are already in ear, and every leaf on every tree, every grass on its stalk is spread to its fullest …..” (Fathers and Children - Ivan Turgenev, 1862)

affinity

“Nature speaks in hints and unfinished sentences; our real ….. for things reveals itself in these faint indications.” (Essays: Second Series - Emerson, 1844)

lightweight

“I have always felt the difference between a heavy sentence and a ….. one; the latter carries farther, as if buoyed by some invisible grace.” — (Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Italo Calvino, 1988)

knowledge

“Sam Torn, a regent who chairs the Committee on Academic and Student Affairs said that it had “become clear” in recent months that some Texas A&M courses were veering beyond what administrators wanted.  Curriculum is created and approved based on the accepted body of ….. needed for our students to be successful in their chosen profession,” Mr. Torn said. “It is unacceptable for other material to be taught instead.” (New York Times, Nov. 13, 2025)

earthworm

“Darwin spent his last years watching the humble ….. at work and concluded that no other creature has played so important a part in the history of the world.” (Charles Darwin - The Formation of Vegetable Mould, 1881)

ramada

“In the border country the heat stood like a wall, and a traveler could ride half a day without finding shade until he came upon a rough ….. of poles and brush thrown up against the sun.” (The Border Trilogy - Cormac McCarthy, 1999)

HOBBIT

“In a hole in the ground there lived a ….. — not a dank or empty hole, but one filled with comfort, food, and the quiet dignity of an ordinary life about to be interrupted.” (The .... - J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937)

intimate

“the deepest human truths are quiet, personal, even ….., and reveal themselves in the small courtesies of daily life.” (Howards End - E. M. Forster, 1910)

notations

“One of the secret pleasures of used books is the penciled ….. in the margins—faint traces of some earlier reader noticing, doubting, agreeing in exactly the places where I now stop to think.”

greenhouse

“We have amplified the planet’s ….. effect so sharply that the world now warms in ways no one alive has ever witnessed.” (The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014)

eyelash

“That’s how one strokes a cat or bird / Or looks at slender lady riders / Just laughter in his quiet eyes, / Beneath his light gold …..es.” (“In the Evening” - Anna Akhmatova, 1914)

shootout

“the gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted less than thirty seconds, yet that brief ….. has come to stand for an entire era of Western violence and mythmaking.” (And Die in the West - Paula Mitchell Marks, 1989)

(Inspired by an idea from Jennifer Vickers. Finished at Gail's Bakery, near Boris Nemsov Place, London November 17, 2025) 

“A very small cause determines a considerable effect; we say this is due to chance. If we knew the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict the situation at a later moment.”

Pushkin

“A deaf man summoned a deaf man to the judgment of a deaf judge.” (… - The Deaf Judge (Глухой судья), 1828)

Outlaw

One of the most infamous … gangs of bank robbers met their end in Coffeyville, Kansas, in October 1892. Of the three Dalton brothers involved, only Emmett (shot 23 times) survived. After 14 years in prison, he became a Hollywood consultant. Emmett said they would have made their getaway except that they had to hitch their horses slightly farther away than planned.

Isolate

When the cardinals split in 1378, Christendom found itself with two Vicars of Christ—one in Rome, one in Avignon—each excommunicating the other in God’s name. Then, at Pisa in 1409, a council meant to heal the breach elected a third pope, giving the world three pontiffs, each one …d, each one denouncing the other two as the Antichrist. (Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror, 1978)

Newton

Isaac … wrote to Robert Hooke in November 1679: “I have not yet received your hypothesis of compounding the celestial motions of the planets of a direct motion by the tangent and an attractive motion towards the central body.” (The Correspondence of Isaac … Vol. 2 - Cambridge University Press, 1960)

Chaos Theory

In 1961, MIT professor Edward Lorenz (1917–2008) reran his weather simulation, entering 0.506 instead of 0.506127—a change of  .000127. This infinitesimal difference caused the weather forecast to completely diverge. That moment was the birth of the idea that would become … .

Allele

A small change in a single … helped shape the human mind. One tiny difference in our DNA opened the way to language, memory, and imagination—a minute twist in code made us what we are.

Riefenstahl

(1902–2003) Leni …’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, filmed in Nuremberg to commemorate the first anniversary of Nazi rule in the Third Reich, is recognized for its cinematography and enduring role in the history of political propaganda.

Efficacious

In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington warned that “to the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a government for the whole is indispensable.” Sixty-five years later, that Union would fracture despite his warning. The document he praised as … could not, by itself, prevent the Civil War.

Sawdust

Ed Crane, the barber in the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), sweeps … across the floor of his shop as he narrates: “The more I looked at people, the less sense they made to me.” His schemes—investing in a dry-cleaning business, a blackmail letter—cascade into murder and the electric chair.

Celestial

The three-body problem in … mechanics has no general solution. Newton solved two gravitating bodies in 1687, but for three—Earth, Moon, Sun, or any trio of masses—the equations are deterministic yet their long-term behavior unpredictable. Small changes in starting positions lead to radically different orbits. In Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel The Three-Body Problem (and its 2024 Netflix adaptation), the Trisolarans face this chaos directly—their civilization rises and falls with unpredictable Stable and Chaotic Eras caused by three suns whose gravitational dance no equation can solve.

Io

On March 5, 1979, Voyager 1 photographed Jupiter’s moon … . Navigation engineer Linda Morabito noticed an anomalous crescent extending three hundred kilometers above the limb—a volcanic plume, the first active volcanism discovered beyond Earth. Tidal forces from Jupiter, Europa, and Ganymede—a three-body resonance—heat …’s interior, powering more than 400 volcanoes.

Elucidate

In his 1967 paper “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?”, Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) used fractal geometry to … a paradox: a coastline’s length increases without limit as the measuring unit shrinks. A bay contains smaller bays, which contain smaller inlets—endlessly. The answer depends on the scale of observation.

Nettled

“In Pushkin’s The Deaf Judge, a dispute between two deaf men ends in nonsense: the ……deaf judge, unable to hear anything, finds an innocent girl guilty after listening without hearing two deaf men argue.” (Pushkin - Глухой судья, 1828)

Calculate

The Catholic Church needed to … the precise date of Easter, which depends on the spring equinox. In 1655, astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini installed a meridian line in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna—a small hole in the roof projected sunlight onto a brass line on the floor. The spot’s shifting position traced an analemma, revealing Earth’s axial tilt, orbital eccentricity, and the precession of the equinoxes. These small accumulated deviations were impossible to … by formula alone.

Estimate

The National Weather Service can … five-day forecasts with 90% accuracy; ten-day forecasts drop to 50%. Beyond two weeks, atmospheric chaos—sensitive dependence on initial conditions—makes deterministic prediction impossible. We know the equations governing weather perfectly, yet cannot solve them forward in time.

Assault

In early 1378, the city of Perugia launched an … on nearby Castiglione Ugolino. Years of minor provocations had sharpened tensions, but the brutal massacre at Cesena by papal forces under Robert of Geneva made the papal-aligned Castiglione Ugolino an intolerable threat. Perugia ordered an armed contingent to lay siege, attack, and raze the fortress to its foundations.

Noteworthy

In 217 BCE, near Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, Hannibal orchestrated the largest ambush of an army in recorded history. His force—Libyan and Iberian infantry, Numidian and Celtic cavalry, Balearic slingers—used morning fog and the curvature of the terrain to surprise and trap Flaminius’s Roman legions (the Flaminian Way named after him), annihilating them in hours—fifteen thousand dead. Flaminius himself was reputedly killed by the Gaul Ducarius.

Differential

The three-body problem requires nine … equations to describe three masses in motion. Poincaré proved in 1889 that no formula solves them. Small changes in where the bodies start lead to vastly different orbits over time.

Mathematics

NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon required constant mid-course corrections. The … was exact in Newton’s laws, Einstein’s refinements, and computer calculations to many decimal places, yet the spacecraft drifted from its predicted path. Initial measurements, however precise, could not account for accumulated errors. Three mid-course burns were standard for every lunar trajectory. (NASA Mission Reports - Apollo Program, 1968–1972)

Elevate

European robins … quantum effects to the scale of navigation. Cryptochrome proteins in their retinas create pairs of entangled electrons sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field. A quantum state—existing in superposition for microseconds—determines whether the bird flies north or south, whether it reaches Scandinavia or dies at sea. Perhaps the subtlest phenomenon in physics guides migration across continents.

Tidewaters

… are caused by the Moon’s gravitational pull varying across Earth’s diameter, with the Sun contributing about 46% as much force. When Earth, Moon, and Sun align—at new moon and full moon—spring tides occur with maximum range. At quarter moons, when the three bodies form a right angle, neap tides have minimum range. A three-body system we experience twice daily. (NOAA - Tides and Water Levels, 2023)

Humiliate

In HBO’s Game of Thrones (2015), Cersei Lannister is stripped, shorn, and forced to walk naked through the streets of King’s Landing while the crowd jeers and chants “shame.” The walk of shame is meant to … her, a medieval ritual revived on screen.

Overview

In the winter of 1863, as the Union split and the war’s purpose blurred, Abraham Lincoln alone seemed to hold an … of the whole. Ultimately it was this larger vision, coupled with his compassion and frontier grit, that kept the Union together.

Devaluate

The denarius, first minted in the 3rd century BCE, was Rome’s stable silver coin. To fund endless wars and imperial excess, successive emperors …d it by reducing its silver content. By the Crisis of the Third Century (around 260 CE), the denarius was almost completely bronze.

(Completed at Castiglione Ugolino, November 10, 2025)

Inspired by a gift of Pushkin poetry from Eugenia Quintanilla and a subsequent conversation with Daniel McCord. We decided to memorize together Pushkin’s absurdist poem. As I struggled to commit it to memory, it suddenly dawned on me that Pushkin had created a poetic expression of the three-body problem in physics, which in turn brought Poincaré to mind.

Глухой глухого звал к суду судьи глухого,

Глухой кричал: “Моя им сведена корова!”

“Помилуй, — возопил глухой тому в ответ, —

Сей пустошью владел еще покойный дед.”

Судья решил: “Чтоб не было разврата,

Жените молодца, хоть девка виновата.”

“I’ve been looking into schedules. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. A schedule defends from whim, it’s a scaffolding, a safety net for catching days, a lifeboat, a haven set into the wreck of time.” (1989)

ANYWHERE

“Catholicism was scary to me with God’s unblinking scrutiny watching my every action and judging my every thought, but it was a baseline phenomenon like the sky and the ocean. But in this woman’s mind the Catholic Church wasn’t just something that existed, it was an institution that had a motive. I didn’t have ….. in my imagination to file that thought.” (Stephen Harrigan - Sorrowful Mysteries, 2025)

NIGHT WATCH

….. is a 1973 British film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey, reuniting them from their 1960 collaboration Butterfield 8 and marking their final appearance together on screen. Some of the story elements echo the 1944 film Gaslight.

NEPHEW

Nicholas Nickleby is the ….. of Ralph Nickleby in Charles Dickens’s novel (1838). Ralph, a cold and miserly money-lender, represents the corrupting power of greed, while Nicholas embodies youthful idealism.

IVY

The term “….. League” was first used by sportswriter Stanley Woodward in the 1930s referring to the older East Coast colleges whose brick buildings were covered in ….. The eight schools - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell - formed the athletic conference in 1954.

EFFACED

Stalin ….. purged officials from official photographs. Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD during the Great Terror, was himself removed from a 1938 photograph with Stalin after his 1940 execution. (David King - The Commissar Vanishes, 1997)

DIFFERENT

“People of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral, and physical circumstances so ….. from our own as to constitute almost a foreign civilization. As a result, qualities of conduct that we recognize as familiar amid these alien surroundings are revealed as permanent in human nature.” (Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror, 1978)

IONS

Derived from Greek for “traveler” - Michael Faraday coined the term “…..” in 1834 to describe electrically charged particles that migrate toward electrodes during electrolysis. 

LOWDOWN

“give me the …..” entered American vernacular in the early 1900s from criminal circles, meaning the story beneath surface appearances. By the 1920s it had spread to mean any confidential information. (H. L. Mencken - The American Language, 1919)

LOCUST

In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the .... Hollywood serves as the setting for characters whose American dreams are ultimately consumed and destroyed.

ASHY

Excavations at Pompeii revealed bodies frozen in their final moments covered in thick ….. layers from Vesuvius. The volcanic debris preserved everything — bread in ovens, wine in amphorae, even the expressions of terror on victims’ faces.

ROADHOUSES

During Prohibition ….. flourished along country roads beyond city limits where local laws were loosely enforced. These establishments offered illegal alcohol, gambling, and music.

DIVORCE

Unable to secure a papal ….. from Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 and established the Church of England with himself as Supreme Head. 

TROUNCED

George McGovern was ….. by Richard Nixon in 1972, winning only Massachusetts and D.C. while Nixon secured 520 electoral votes. It was the most lopsided presidential defeat in American history — and for some the most disappointing.

HOMESTEAD

Abraham Lincoln signed the ….. Act in 1862 offering 160 acres of western land free to any citizen who would farm it for five years. Between 1862 and 1934 the Act distributed 270 million acres — ten percent of all U.S. land.

EVILS

Augustine argued that ….. are not substances but privations, the absence of good rather than intrinsic in themselves.

WISTERIA

In Southern literature ….. may symbolize nostalgia with its blooms draped over old porches and abandoned houses.

ROOFS

The history of ….. reveals social hierarchy and geography: thatched straw for peasants, slate for the prosperous, tile for Mediterranean climates. ….. tell stories of class and place.

INEFFABLE

From Latin ineffabilis: in- (not) + effabilis (able to be expressed), from effari (to speak out). The word describes experiences so profound they transcend language, what can't be captured in words when words would be a diminution.

TOSSES

“Life ….. us like driftwood on the waves,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. We struggle for control, create structures and routines, yet circumstances throw us around unpredictably. 

IDOL

Francis Bacon identified four “…..s of the Mind” that distort human understanding - …..s of the Tribe , of the Cave, of the Marketplace, and of the Theatre (Novum Organum, 1620)

NAMESAKE

In “The …..” (2003), Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of Gogol Ganguli named after the Russian writer exploring how carrying another’s name shapes identity.

GOT

“I ….. You Babe” by Sonny and Cher plays on the radio alarm clock every morning in Groundhog Day (1993) marking the beginning of Phil Connors’s repeated day. 

LAMBKINS

“I invited all seven of them to my office. What would happen if they formed a mutual support club? What would happen if they exulted in their quietness, celebrated their introversion? What if they formed a club called the ….. Society?” (E. Lee Walker - Imagination House, 2019)

ICED TEA

“The ….. sweated in its pitcher on the sideboard and Laurel brought out the good glasses, the ones with the etched magnolias. Some things required ceremony, even especially the conversations you dreaded. She poured, handed a glass to her sister, and they sat in the parlor’s dimness, the ….. untouched between them, waiting.” (Eudora Welty - The Collected Stories, 1980)

FUNGUS

The Italian tartufo (truffle) is a prized underground ….. that commands astronomical prices. They grow in symbiosis with tree roots. Trained dogs hunt for them in the forests of Umbria.

EPOCH

“Everywhere on Earth, traces of earlier ….. persist in the contours of landforms and the rocks beneath. The discipline of geology is akin to an optical device for seeing the Earth text in all its dimensions. ” (Marcia Bjornerud - Timefulness, 2018)

(Completed at Castiglione Ugolino November 3, 2025)

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.” (1997)

mapmaker

“I bought all thirteen maps. Even without language to identify information in the keys, even without titles, I could decipher what the …. was up to.” (Barry Lopez - The Mappist, 2005)

one half

“…… of our country cannot stand the other half.” (Adapted from Jane Austen - Emma, 1815)

mood

“In the ….,” played by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra and recorded in 1939, has come to symbolize the 1940s, World War II, and the entire Big Band Era.

afterthought

The French equivalent of …… is esprit de l’escalier—it describes what might have been a witty comeback but is thought of too late as one is walking down the stairs. The philosopher Denis Diderot coined the term in his essay Paradoxe sur le Comédien.

dishonest

“I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low …. decade.” (W. H. Auden - “September 1, 1939,” 1939)

Antonio

……: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.” (William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene I, c. 1596)

yew

“At Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), English longbows cut from the …… whose sapwood and heartwood balance tension and compression decided the field.” (Juliet Barker - Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle, 2005)

taproot

“To have such a deep …… in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn’t imagine it.” (Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You, 2014)

Hugo

Dostoevsky called …. “a genius of feeling,” and critics trace Raskolnikov’s moral awakening to a kinship with Jean Valjean. (Joseph Frank - Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1995)

epitaph

“OF THOSE IMMORTAL DEAD WHO LIVE AGAIN IN MINDS MADE BETTER BY THEIR PRESENCE. HERE LIES THE BODY OF GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN CROSS) BORN 22 NOVEMBER 1819 DIED 22 DECEMBER 1880.” (George Eliot’s … - Highgate Cemetery, London, England)

mechanical

“He had become a …… creature, performing acts without thought, his mind elsewhere.” (George Orwell - 1984, 1949)

ace

Ira Ringold, known as “……,” is destroyed by his wife’s betrayal in (Philip Roth - I Married a Communist, 1998)

negligent

“The possibility of spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not …..ly mislead my readers and that I took pains to investigate the subject.” (Charles Dickens - Bleak House)

mop

“Rag …..” was a popular American song of the late 1940s–early 1950s and is considered an example of proto–rock and roll, as it contained elements that would later define the genre.

abolishment

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The …… of it became the nation’s moral hinge. (Abraham Lincoln - Letter to Albert G. Hodges, 1864)

describe

“Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and whatever you can …… truly, do so.” (John Ruskin - The Elements of Drawing, 1857)

Etonian

…. Robert Bridges waited until 1918, twenty-nine years after his friend’s death, to publish the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Occult

“Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the ‘triviality of everydayness,’ if he is to do anything worthwhile.” (The … - Colin Wilson, 1971)

fraudulent

“My mom once told me that’s the secret of life. We all think we’re ….. Everybody’s winging it.” (Elan Mastai - All Our Wrong Todays, 2017)

Whitman

“Animals do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” (Walt …. - Leaves of Grass, 1855)

olio

The Agromafia is a successful strain of Italian crime families dealing in “top quality” …… The fake Extra Virgin Olive Oil market is worth $16 billion a year. Mafia families can earn as much as three times more than those trafficking cocaine.

ravenous

“Ye nobles are like …. wolves,” wrote Jacques de Vitry, a 13th-century author of sermons and moral tales. “Therefore shall ye howl in hell who despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.” Whatever the peasant amasses in a year, “the knight, the noble devours in an hour.” (Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror, 1978)

detritus

“But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of …… We take the ideas we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting around.” (Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From, 2010)

startle

“I ….d a weasel who ….d me, and we exchanged a long glance.” (Annie Dillard - Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982)

(Completed at Taverna del Lupo, Gubbio, October 29, 2025)

“We become just by doing just acts, brave by brave acts, temperate by temperate acts. Virtues are acquired by doing what one would do if one already had a state of character. Excellence arises from habit, not from lectures.” (1988)

loud

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. How many thousands of times did I say those words while I was growing up, either out … or in silent murmuring as I dutifully recited my prayers at night? For a Catholic of my generation, of my spiritual saturation level, the Hail Mary is verbal DNA, not just memorized but encoded.” (Sorrowful Mysteries - Stephen Harrigan, 2025)

enlarge

“To … the mind is not to fill it but to make it hospitable.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James, 1902)

abstract

“Since Aristotle’s man is by nature a political animal, he attains the good life within society, and thus the question of what is a good life cannot be answered for an individual in …ion from the society in which he lives.” (Politics - Aristotle, c. 350 BCE)

Rebecca

“Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1940 starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, … was Alfred Hitchcock’s first American project.”
(Rebecca - Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

trajectory

“Superstition, which disappeared from history in Thucydides, returns with Xenophon, and supernatural agency is invoked to explain the … of events.” (The Life of Greece - Will Durant, 1939)

habits of the heart

“The … are the mores, the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.” (Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835–40)

efface

“The soul clears a space for truth through the slow work of self …ment.” (Gravity and Grace - Simone Weil, 1947)

Daedalus

“In the image of …, Joyce found both the craftsman and the exile.” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce, 1916)

ebb

“At the … of the tide, the whole world seems suspended between stillness and change.” (The Edge of the Sea - Rachel Carson, 1955)

symposium

“We discover ourselves through dialogue.” (The … - Plato, c. 385 BCE)

idiosyncratic

“In trying to learn about my … self, I begin to learn about mankind.” (Essays - Michel de Montaigne, 1580)

raft

“It’s lovely to live on a … with nothin’ to worry about nor nobody to bother.” (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, 1884)

embryo

“The soul is not born finished; it is an … of possibilities.” (On the Soul - Aristotle, c. 350 BCE)

tobacco

“Big … learned to sell appetite as freedom, turning habit into hunger.” (The Cigarette Century - Allan M. Brandt, 2007)

object

“The will finds its worth not in the … desired but in the law it obeys.”
(Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals - Immanuel Kant, 1785)

unread

“The world is mostly …; we live among unopened pages.” (Poems - Emily Dickinson, c. 1860)

negative

“I mean … capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (Letter to George and Thomas Keats - John Keats, 1817)

Dumas

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of timing. Alexandre … .”
(The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, 1844)

extra

“Nothing … is needed for a good life but the shaping of ordinary things.” (after Aristotle - 4th century BCE)

reweave

“The soul is not broken once; it is … daily through forgiveness.” (After The Nature and Destiny of Man - Reinhold Niebuhr, 1941–43)

sequester

“We are …ed not to be alone, but to belong more deeply.” (After A Timbered Choir - Wendell Berry, 1998)

twelve

“To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or … , only ten or … Strokes of havoc únselve The sweet especial scene.” (Binsey Poplars - Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879)

Aristotle

“Born in Stagira in 384 BC, died 322 BC in Chalcis at age 62. Student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great.” (… Biography - Classical Sources, 4th century BCE)

nymph

“You …s, call'd Naiads, of the wind'ring brooks, With your sedg'd crowns and ever harmless looks, Leave your crisp channels, and on this green land. Answer your summons.” (The Tempest - William Shakespeare, 1610–11)

down

“The medicaments have no effect on me now; my limbs are more swollen than ever, and I sleep sitting up instead of reclining. One advantage of death will be to lie … again on a bed.” (Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951)

(Finished October 17, 2025 on the eve of our departure for Italy;

This effort was inspired by my chancing upon Jonathan Lear's obituary in the New York Times October 8, 2025. I immediately purchased his book and began this acrostic meditation after reading the above passage. I note that it took 9 days to complete. I am once again stunned at how someone else's writing can create such a deep sense of connection.)

“The paper of Bothe and Kohlhorster came like a flash of light revealing the existence of an unsuspected world which no one had begun to explore. It became my overwhelming ambition to participate in the exploration.” (1964)

BOXTOP

The term … partially evolved from the Latin buxus to become a cultural phenomenon in American consumer life. As packaged goods rose, particularly cereals, this container lid transformed into valuable currency for prizes and rewards, until television replaced radio. (An All-Consuming Century - Gary Cross, 2000)

RECEIVE

“The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever …d by all the radio telescopes on Planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.” (Cosmos - Carl Sagan, 1980)

UNHEEDED

NASA scientist James Hansen’s testimony to Congress in 1988 about global warming went largely …, as did his subsequent warnings that humanity had only a narrow window to prevent catastrophic climate change. His predictions about extreme weather events proved remarkably accurate. (Storms of My Grandchildren - James Hansen, 2009)

NIGHTWALK

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an insomniac flâneur known for his …s through London’s darkened streets, where he gathered nocturnal observations that would populate his novels. (Night Walks - Charles Dickens, 1860)

OXEN

The term “vaccine” comes from vacca (cow) after Edward Jenner (1796) observed that milkmaids exposed to … pox gained immunity to smallpox, launching modern immunology. (An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae - Edward Jenner, 1798)

ROOMMATE

Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy’s legendary collaboration began when Hardy recognized genius in his future …’s letters from India, leading to breakthrough theorems that transformed modern mathematics. (A Mathematician’s Apology - G. H. Hardy, 1940)

ONCOGENE

Peyton Rous lived to see his dismissed 1911 chicken tumor virus discovery vindicated by both the 1966 Nobel Prize and the later identification of its …, proving revolutionary insights may wait generations for understanding. (Cell - Bishop & Varmus, 1976)

SLOW HUNCH

The double helix structure of DNA emerged from what James Watson called a “…,” months of late-night discussions with Francis Crick at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory (1951) where gradually emerging patterns led to their revolutionary model. (The Double Helix - James D. Watson, 1968)

SHATTERPROOF

NASA’s requirement for … materials during the Apollo program revolutionized materials science, as spacecraft windows needed to withstand both the vacuum of space and micrometeoroid impacts at orbital velocities. (The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology - NASA SP Series, 1969–1974)

INTUITIVE

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s partnership at Apple emerged from their … understanding of the personal computer’s potential. (Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson, 2011)

CINEMATOGRAPHER

Gregg Toland, the innovative … on Citizen Kane (1941), revolutionized Hollywood by insisting his deep-focus shots and low-angle compositions be written into Welles’ screenplay, forever elevating camera work from craft to art. (The Making of Citizen Kane - Robert L. Carringer, 1985)

ORTHODOX BELIEF

In 325 CE, the Council of Nicaea codified Christian … in the Nicene Creed, defining true doctrine as adherence to “right belief” — from Greek orthos (correct) + doxa (opinion). (A Short History of Christianity - Stephen Tomkins, 2005)

SERENDIP

The Persian name … for Sri Lanka entered English through Horace Walpole’s 1754 letter about The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” (The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity - Merton & Barber, 2004)

MOONLIGHT

In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin mapped a city’s consciousness through his meandering observations by …. (Ulysses - James Joyce, 1922)

INEFFABLE

Neuroscientist David Chalmers (1995) defined consciousness as the “hard problem” because of its … quality — the impossibility of reducing subjective experience to any physical description. (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness - David J. Chalmers, 1995)

CAPPELLETTI

These “little hats” of pasta, called … for their shape, originated in Emilia-Romagna where medieval monks first documented their preparation, preserving their recipes in monastery archives. (La scienza in cucina - Pellegrino Artusi, 1891)

REAL TIME

NASA’s Apollo missions (1969) pioneered … computing systems that could process spacecraft telemetry within microseconds, establishing protocols still used in modern mission control. (Journey to the Moon: The History of the AGC - Eldon C. Hall, 1996)

ALPHABET

Lenin’s 1917 decree on the Cyrillic … eliminated letters like ѣ (yat) and ѳ (fita) from medieval church texts, marking a symbolic break with tsarist Russia. (History of the Russian Orthographic Reform - 1917–1918 Decrees)

YACHT

Percy Shelley’s last voyage on Byron’s … ended in the Gulf of Spezia (1822), claiming the life of the poet who had shared ghost-story competitions with Mary Shelley at Villa Diodati, where Frankenstein was born. (Shelley: The Pursuit - Richard Holmes, 1974)

SHAWSHANK

The name “…” has entered everyday speech as shorthand for unshakeable resistance to injustice, drawn from the film’s portrayal of Andy Dufresne’s relentless, decades-long path to freedom. (The Shawshank Redemption - Frank Darabont, 1994)

(Finished in Austin Texas October 14, 2025)

“Although we’ve learned much about cosmic rays since their discovery more than a century ago, we still don’t know exactly where they come from. Cosmic rays remain one of the most intractable scientific puzzles of all time.” (2024)

Socratic

The ….. method is disciplined curiosity in the form of dialogue. (Living Towards Virtue - Paul Woodruff, 2023)

Pauli Exclusion

The ….   ….. Principle is time tempered space keeping — no two fermions can be in the same state at the same time. (Nelson Duller Lectures, 1960)

loathsome

“For I am none such; I am no ….. leper: look on me.” (Henry VI - William Shakespeare, 1590)

intrinsic rhythms

“It’s about the …. …. of the solid earth—the paces of tectonics and landscape evolution, and how a geologic perspective requires us to abandon any belief in the permanence of topographic features.” (Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud, 2018)

newsworthy

“….,” meaning “of sufficient interest to the public to warrant reporting,” is first recorded circa 1932 as a combination of news + worthy. (Etymology Online)

thermometer

“Millikan’s balloons finally began lifting off from the Texas hardscrabble terrain in the winter of 1921–1922. Along with the specially designed electroscope they carried a barometer and .... to monitor the environmental conditions in flight” (Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton, 2024)

evangelical

“The sects which are ……….. are always the most republican.” (Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835)

recovered

“Florence, named for its flowers, had begun some two centuries before Christ as a trading post on the Arno. Ruined by the barbarian invasions, it ..... in the eighth century as a crossroads on the Via Francesa between France and Rome. ” (Will Durant - The Age of Faith, 1949)

scientology

“……….. presents itself as a science of the mind, but at its heart it is a creation of one man’s imagination, systematized into a religion.” (Going Clear - Lawrence Wright, 2013)

offshoot

“An ………. may flourish when conditions allow, branching into forms as different as finches or philosophies.” (The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins, 1976)

fewest

“Those forms which possess in the highest degree the conditions for life will leave the greatest number of offspring, and those that possess them in the lowest degree will leave the ………. .” (On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin, 1859)

immutable

“Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, ……..; to believe that nothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact time is variable and ever-changing. It even has shape.” (A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson, 2003)

northwest

“We continued our course in a ………. direction, over a high country with little timber, the soil rich and covered with grass.” (Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1805)

fallacy

“A …….. arises when we mistake the limits of our own knowledge for the limits of what can be known.” (Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits - Bertrand Russell, 1948)

immediacy

“Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other, without losing the ………. of presence.” (Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke, 1929)

Nebuchadnezzar

“………. built walls and towers that no future enemy might overthrow, and adorned the city with great magnificence.” (Antiquities of the Jews - Flavius Josephus, 1st century CE)

inaccurate

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me ………. .” (The Life and Times - Albert Einstein, 1947)

tome

“A book is a …….. if it weighs a pound and a half more than its content.” (Letter to Louise Colet - Gustave Flaubert, 1852)

yoke

“Fatima was the name of the daughter of the prophet Muhammad. But the town and the parish were supposedly named after a Muslim girl who had been kidnapped by a Christian knight in 1158, when much of Portugal was still under the Mohammedan ……..” (Sorrowful Mysteries - Stephen Harrigan, 2025)

(Completed at First LIght Book Store - October 1, 2025)

“There’s still some phantom need to belong to something I can no longer belong to, with a nostalgia for someone I can no longer be – an innermost Catholic self that can neither be thoroughly expelled nor honestly embraced.”

Hegel

“Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ....) (1770-1831)

Apocalyptic

“We might scoff at …. thinking, but the even more pervasive idea—indeed, economic credo—that levels of consumption can and should increase continuously is just as deluded. And while the need for long-range vision grows more acute, our attention spans are shrinking, as we text and tweet in a hermetic, narcissistic Now.” (Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud, 2018)

Reach

“Things ….ed such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough.” (A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson, 2003)

Rollo

…. is first recorded in 918 as the leader of a group of Viking settlers. The offspring of ….. and his followers became known as the ‘Normans’ (Wikipedia)

Inflation

“I don’t mind going back to daylight saving time. With ….. the hour will be the only thing I’ve saved all year.” (Victor Borge) (1909-2000)

Gone

“We’d get up cold, go to bed cold, throw our filthy clothes in the machine in the basement and forget them down there for days. Even now, the smell of clothes …. rank in the washer takes me right back. That smell was our whole life.” (Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver, 2022)

Allotment

“Unlike the Lower Basin states, the Upper Basin has never used its entire legal ….., while the Lower Basin for years used more water than the river supplied and depleted water supplies stored in Mead and Powell.” (Denver Post - Elise Schmelzer)

Noble

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a ….. exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.” (Henry David Thoreau) (1817-1862)

Stolen

“For it appears that two nights ago a Finnish passport and Finnish currency were …. from one of the hotel’s Finnish guests. Then last night, a raincoat and hat were …. from an American journalist. This afternoon, investigators were sent to Leningradsky Railway Station, where confirmation was obtained that a man wearing the hat and coat in question was seen boarding the overnight train to Helsinki.” (A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles, 2016)

Oblong

“Also called a quizzer, this was a round, oval, or ….. lens, mounted in a frame, sometimes ornately. Quizzing-glasses were popular from the 18th-century onwards and were usually hung from a chain worn round the users neck.” (Charles Dickens Glossary)

Rotten

“I smelled the rich vapor of loam around my face and wondered again why all that death—all those …. leaves that one layer down are black sops roped in white webs of mold, all those millions of dead summer insects—didn’t smell worse.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard) (1974)

Romance

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong ....” (An Ideal Husband - Oscar Wilde, 1895)

Oberon

“All through her life, .... was vigilant about hiding her past. When ….’s nephew by marriage, writer Michael Korda, wanted to write a memoir called ‘Charmed Lives,’ ….. threatened to sue him if he mentioned any details about her background.” (Forgotten Hollywood: Merle …. and Her Lifelong Secret - Golden Globes)

Whole

“…. devotions dropped from use, even the Mass, the central act of the church had become unrecognizable, a thing of guitars instead of the organ, English instead of Latin, of youth culture fads instead of ancient rites.” (Bare Ruined Choirs - Garry Wills, 1972)

Fatima

“The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That’s the way it will be with our love for each other. …. is a woman of the desert. She knows that men have to go away in order to return.” (The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho, 1988)

Untarnished

“It was an awkward question for the church, which from early on placed a massive emphasis on the idea of Mary being ‘the .... vessel of virginity.’” (Book - Author)

Land

“Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner ….scape, the memories and dreams. Man’s very insides—his self—are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him” (The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker, 1973)

Moonstone

“The dying Indian sank to his knees, pointed to the dagger in Herncastle’s hand, and said, in his native language—‘The …. will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!’ He spoke those words, and fell dead on the floor.” (The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins, 1868)

Yachtsmen

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to ….. who play with their boats at sea, ‘cruising’ it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in.” (Sterling Hayden) (1916-1986)

Stench

“Within a day, the pope’s nose fell off and had to be reattached with sculptors’ putty. The smell was so offensive, even after the corpse was covered with thick sheets of cellophane, that one of the Swiss Guards watching over the coffin collapsed from the ….” (Jesus Wept - Philip Shenon)

Thirteenth

“I had come to Fatima in late May, deliberately timing my visit to avoid the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who arrive here on the ….. of every month from May to October to worship on the days of the six apparitions.” (Book - Author)

Eggnog

“.... reminds me of mucus.” “Me too, but in a good way” (Wonder Woman Warbinger - Leigh Bardugo, 2017)

Retold

“Fairy tales are meant to be ....” (J.R.R. Tolkien) (1892-1973)

Imbibe

“After leaving school at Coventry he went to a private tutor’s at Birmingham, where he ....d strong High-Church views.” (George Eliot’s Life - J. W. Cross, 1885)

Exegesis

“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and …. of the world and not a world-explanation.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) (1844-1900)

Shoehorns

“Elizabeth I of England bought 18 …. from her shoemaker Garrett Johnson between 1563 and 1566, then in 1567 ordered four more in steel from the blacksmiths Gilbert Polson and Richard Jeffrey.” (Wikipedia)

(September 8, 2025 - Austin, Texas​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​)

"Civilization is older than we think. Under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names have been lost in the careless flow of time."

Wordsworth

“That best portion of a good life; little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.” (Tintern Abbey - William ….., 1798)

Islands

“Between the Greek mainland and Crete, some 220 … dot the Aegean Sea, forming a circle around Delos, and hence are called the Cyclades.” (Book - Author, 1939)

Longbottom 

There are all kinds of courage," said Dumbledore, smiling. "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville ....!" (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling, 2001)

Leeuwenhoek

“Through his handcrafted microscopes, ….. was the first to observe bacteria, protozoa, and the hidden world of the cell.” (The Scientific Revolution - Steven Shapin, 1996)

Downhearted

“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time; no man who is … will ever accomplish much.” (Charles Dickens - David Copperfield, 1850)

Unbeknownst

“….. to the rest of the world, she had been carrying a quiet strength all along, revealed only in the trial of adversity.” (Far from the Madding Crows - Thomas Hardy, 1874)

Revived

“At length she …, and with faint voice told how hope had returned to her after the long darkness.” (Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

Awesome

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of it. When we recognize the scale of the cosmos, it is truly ….” (The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan, 1995)

Nostradamus

“The prophecies of …., written in cryptic verse, have for centuries stirred fear and fascination among those seeking signs of destiny.” (The Prophecies of ….. - Erika Cheetham, 1973)

Thanatos

“Alongside the life instinct, Eros, there exists in man the death instinct, ….., which strives toward destruction and a return to the inanimate state.” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud, 1920)

Tin

“By the end of the Early Minoan Age the Cretans learn to mix copper with ….., and the Bronze Age begins.” (Book - Author, 1939)

How

“.…ever that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand ….. one could have enough of any beloved.” (Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951)

End

“This is not the ….., it is not even the beginning of the ….., but it is, perhaps, the ….. of the beginning.” (Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon - Winston Churchill, 1942)

Lift

“We think that our worldview represents an ‘epistemic rupture so radical that nothing of the past survives’ in it and that our technologies … us above the oppression of natural history. But stranded on the island of Now, we are lonely.” (Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud, 2018)

Inhuman

“From this life they took for themselves all its most .... essence, all its poisonous rotten juice—and as readily as if it had been this liquid, and not milk, that they had sucked from their mothers’ breasts in infancy.” (The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973)

Flaw

“There is a crack, a ….. in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (Anthem - Leonard Cohen, 1992)

Eliza

See them walking in the park, long after dark, Taking in the sights of the city, Look around, look around, ...., They are trying to do the unimaginable (Hamilton - Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015)

Obediah

“The vision of ….. . Thus saith the Lord God concerning Edom; We have heard a rumour from the Lord, and an ambassador is sent among the heathen.” (The Book of ….., The Holy Bible King James Version)

Flew

“One … Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of only three films to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Director, and Screenplay).” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Milos Forman (director), 1975)

Goethe

“What you have inherited from your fathers, you must earn in order to possess.” (Faust - Johann Wolfgang von ….., 1808)

Raise

“It was the frenzy of Crécy over again. Fallen knights could not ... their horses. Amid call of trumpets, shouted battle cries, and screams of wounded men and horses, both Clermont and the Constable were killed." (A Distant Mirror - Barbara W. Tuchman, 1978)

Edit

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings. To ….. is to learn what to sacrifice.” (attributed - William Faulkner, 1950s lectures)

Envied

“It is better to be ….. than pitied; for men admire those who prosper, but feel no kindness for the unfortunate.” (Histories - Herodotus, 5th century BC)

Chamber of Secrets

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities," (Harry Potter and the.... - J. K. Rowling, 1998)

Even

“.... Freud suffered his whole life from phobias and from death-anxiety; and he came to fully perceive the world under the aspect of natural terror.” (The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker, 1973)

(Completed August 21, 2025)

“But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.”

Dove

“Back home, the peaceniks had their ….s, the hawks had their flags, and no one wanted to hear about the in-between, where most of us lived and died.” (The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien)

Ossetia

“Our ….n guides urged the pack mules forward with strange cries that echoed off the canyon walls.” (A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov)

Newfoundland

“At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to …., the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.” (The Shipping News - Annie Proulx)

Nintendo

“My thumb still remembers where the …. buttons were, muscle memory from a childhood spent rescuing princesses.” (Ready Player One - Ernest Cline)

Animus

“That old …. dissolved the moment she walked into her childhood home, replaced by something harder to name – the person she’d been arguing with all these years was herself.” (Memory Wall - Anthony Doerr)

Traditions

“The …. we inherit are like old maps – they show where others have gone, but not always where we need to go.” (Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri)

Amethyst

“The …. lay dark in the mountain’s heart, waiting for discovery, waiting for someone to understand its worth.” (Deep Time - Richard Fortey)

Randy Newman

“Oh Karl, the world isn’t fair, It isn’t and never will be. They tried out your plan, It brought misery instead. If you’d seen how they worked it, You’d be glad you were dead. Just like I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free, Where the rich just get richer, And the poor you don’t ever have to see. It would depress us, Karl, Because we care, That the world still isn’t fair.” (The World Isn’t Fair - ….)

Thimble

“Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused …ful of matter in the shape of knowledge.” (Middlemarch - George Eliot)

Tows

“Duty … us back to places we thought we’d left.” (The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion)

Theme

“Defects can play a paradoxical role by bringing out latent powers that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its ‘creative’ potential, that forms the central … of this book.” (An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks)

Hazy

“The early 1980s are nowhere viewed through the …. gauze of nostalgia as a simpler, sillier time of shoulder pads and big hair, and it’s easy to dismiss the apocalyptic feelings that hung in the air.” (Turning to Stone - Marcia Bjornerud)

Eye contact

“That moment of …. lasted perhaps two seconds, but in it passed everything we would never say to each other.” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera)

Somatic

“What we call intuition is often just … wisdom – the body knowing before the mind catches up.” (The Embodied Mind - Francisco Varela)

Eureka

“True … moments are less about finding something new than seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar way.” (The Evolution of Everything - Matt Ridley)

Chumps

"In a world of increasing complexity, the .... are the ones who pretend to have all the answers." - (The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Rowdy

“That … laughter at midnight – I didn’t know then it was the sound of friendship becoming memory.” (The Friend - Sigrid Nunez)

Ewe

“They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see! From ten to five, from five to three, A lamb, a wether, and a ….; And then at last from three to two; And, of my fifty, yesterday I had but only one: And here it lies upon my arm, Alas! and I have none; To-day I fetched it from the rock; It is the last of all my flock.” (The Last of the Flock - William Wordsworth)

Thaw

“Where Phoebus’ fire scarce …s the icicles.” (The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare)

(This acrostic was completed during a visit to Bevagna while sitting on the bench near the intersection of Via Gabriele Crescimbeni and Corso Giacomo Matteotti. 

It was originally inspired by a conversation at Castiglione Ugolino with Kate Kadyan three years ago. 

Giacomo Matteotti was the socialist politician kidnapped and murdered by Fascists in 1924 after openly denouncing Mussolini’s regime in Parliament. His death became a rallying point for anti-Fascist resistance.

Gabriele Crescimbeni was a local Bevagna lawyer, arrested during the Nazi occupation for his resistance beliefs and deported to a concentration camp, where he died in 1944.

August 14, 2025)

"It happened the way I knew it would. Live long enough and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between."

Kiwi

Unlike the …, which was nearly wiped out, the Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon became extinct in the first half of the 20th century. The … survived only because of intensive conservation and sustained care.

Inch

"You find out life’s this game of …es. So is football because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it." (Any Given Sunday - Al Pacino)

Nothing

“… in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” (Marie Curie)

Gown

“When I planned my wedding the first time, my ex-husband and I, we were both struggling comics. I rented a wedding ....; the reception hall smelled like feet.” (Sherri Shepherd)

Southwest

“The prime communities of the … are survival communities. Their sustenance is governed by rainfall and wind direction. You can study little enclaves of plant materials, how they huddle together for protection.” (Antoine Predock)

One hundred

“But … years later, the Negro still is not free. …. years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. …. years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

Lightweight

Henry Armstrong fought his way out of poverty to become the only man in history to hold the featherweight, …., and welterweight boxing titles simultaneously in 1938.

Vow

“I …ed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again.” (Orange Is the New Black - Piper Kerman)

Eastland

“I see a dozen ….s every morning on my way to work and a dozen more going home at night,” a jab at how everyday life mirrors the disaster’s class cruelty.” (Carl Sandburg)

Redundant

“I have been made … before and it is a terrible blow; … is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless.” (Billy Connolly)

Death watch

“A measured, muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly’s chamber. And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate began. Next the ghastly ticking of a … in the wall at the bed’s head made Tom shudder, it meant that somebody’s days were numbered.” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain)

Echo

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an …, and if an … sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” (Black Boy - Richard Wright)

Mouth

“Nor …. had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed: / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” (Spring and Fall - Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Obit

“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by …uary, and on the west by tedium.” (Philip Guedalla)

Nonlawyer

Beth Macy in Dopesick describes how families, guided by determined ….. advocates, forced opioid makers into court when official channels failed them.

Consultants

.... at McKinsey & Company advised opioid manufacturers on how to ‘turbocharge’ sales, even as addiction rates climbed.

Outfield

"I thought the greatest ....of all time was in those games in 1953 when Jackie Robinson was playing left field along side Duke Snider in center and Carl Furillo in right." (Edward Walker)

Penne

The ….. Norcina served at Taverna di Isa in Magione Umbria is distinctive in its use of truffles and its generous portions of sausage. It is a favorite dish of the author of this puzzle. 

Pulley

Plutarch's Parallel Lives recounts a scene where Archimedes proved the effectiveness of compound ....s and the block-and-tackle system by using one to pull a fully laden ship towards him. 

Envy

“….’s tooth shall gnaw thy soul.” (Henry VI - William Shakespeare)

Rely

In A.J. Cronin's 1937 novel The Citadel a young doctor becomes disillusioned as he learns how patients are harmed as they  .... on a corrupt medical establishment.

Heroin

In Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh shows ….. as both escape and trap, its rush bought at the cost of everything else worth having.

Evolution

“…. is a theory. It is also a fact.” (“Evolution as Fact and Theory” - Stephen Jay Gould)

Abolish

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or … it” (The Declaration of Independence - Thomas Jefferson)

Drug addiction

“… is a public health crisis, not a moral failing.” (Julianne Moore)

(Completed at Torre di Capo Piccola - August 11, 2025)

“I don't know exactly what a prayer is,

I do know how to pay attention, 

how to fall down into the grass,

how to be idle.

Tell me, what should i have done?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

Ottawa

“The …., part of the Anishinaabe confederacy, still preserve their language and stories today.” (Living Nations, Living Words - Joy Harjo)

Lock box

“The memories were stored in a …. so tight and unspoken she forgot the combination herself.” (The Secret Life of Objects - Alice Munro)

Ito

“At the 1992 Olympics Midori …. became the first woman to land a triple axel.” (Figure Skating Legends - Michelle Kwan) 

Vanishing point

The ... in The Baptism of Christ shows Piero della Francesca’s command of linear perspective.

Edith Wharton

“Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer revealed the high cost of appearances.” (The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton)

Roth

In The Human Stain, Philip …. reveals how a single secret can distort a whole life. 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.” (..... - W.B. Yeats)

Hollywood

"He left Nebraska with nothing but a bus ticket and a dream called ….” (The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry)

Endow

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has ….ed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina - Galileo Galilei)

Shadow

“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel ....s of the indignant desert birds.” (The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats)

Untasted

“He sat with the glass of wine ….. on his knee.” (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson)

Multiplicand

“The …. waits, passive but essential, until the multiplier arrives.” (A Mathematician’s Apology - G.H. Hardy)

Mephistophelean

“The …. bargain he offers is no ordinary temptation, but a sly pact dressed in wit and charm.” (Faust - Goethe)

Eudora Welty

“Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” (One Writer’s Beginnings - ….)

Rattle

“The .... of the dice in the box, the scent of lilacs in the air, and a far-off train—all mixed together in my memory of that summer.” (A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway)

Do with two out

“Snow fell all night. By morning, the gorge had disappeared. I had sent two Chechens ahead. Neither had returned. What should I ... ? I was undecided.” (A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov)

Anyway

“People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self‑centered; forgive them …..” (The Paradoxical Commandments - Kent Keith)

Yellow wood

“Two roads diverged in a …., and sorry I could not travel both.” (The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost)

(Completed at Frede & Vester's, Copenhagen, Denmark - August 2, 2025)

“Although I like looking at paintings, I don’t like looking at them next to someone. I can’t focus if the person next to me is doing the same thing. The advantage of being dead is never having to worry about these things.”

Ischemic

“Mine were the more common,” writes Keith McNally of his strokes. “….”: the word sounds cold, but it rewired everything.

Rug

“The …. would be such an ornament to her boudoir… I outbid her by forty rubles, and bought it over her head. I was rewarded with a glance in which the most delightful fury sparkled. About dinnertime, I ordered my Circassian horse, covered with that very …., purposely to be led past her windows.”
(A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov)

Exponent

“Victims or ,,,s,” wrote Woolf of women’s roles in education — silent, essential, largely forgotten.

Giotto

“…. broke the flatness of medieval art, casting shadows, bending space — as if painting had begun to notice us.” (Art & Silence: Essays on Looking - Margaret Elston)

Respond

“The only journey is the one within. And if the outer world seems cold, it is because we have ceased to …. from our depths.” (Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke)

Etoilated

From the French étioler: to bleach or wither. To be …. is to grow without enough light — stretched, weakened, and pale.

The Heath

…. is a wild park of woodland and meadows, tucked inside north London, sprawling over 800 acres — the park that inspired C.S. Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia, where Constable spent his final years painting.

Anxieties

“The …. weren’t even mine, I was borrowing them for the afternoon.” (10:04 - Ben Lerner)

London

“…. was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of exhaustion than we were.”
(Bleak House - Charles Dickens)

Motorbiked

“I …. across the landscape and my mind followed, trying to catch up.” (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig)

One thing

“A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing …., one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” (The Walk - William deBuys)

Snowflake

“It sifts from leaden sieves,” wrote Dickinson — each …. a silent grammar in alabaster wool.

Think

“You …. you’ll remember it clearly, but memory isn’t kept — it’s rewritten.” (In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado)

Effete

“A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an …. corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” (Spiro Agnew)

Vagabond

“He was a ….; he was a beggar; he was a man without name, without hearth, without home, without bread, without shelter, without country, without a passport…” (Les Misérables - Victor Hugo)

Eighth

“The …. bench was the one with the view, the wind, and the faint smell of regret.” (Field Notes - A. J. Flint)

Rumination

“The …. wasn’t thought exactly — more like thinking’s echo, repeating until the self gave up.” (The Pale King - David Foster Wallace)

Yugoslav

“The …. dream was of unity through difference. It lasted just long enough to become a memory.” (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West)

Task

“The …. was to do good in a world that notices only noise — to move quietly, and leave something steady behind.” (Middlemarch - George Eliot)

Highgate

The …. Cemetery, the final resting place for George Eliot and Karl Marx.

Islington

“A year earlier, she’d become famous in theatrical circles for discovering the dead bodies of playwright Joe Orton and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in their …. flat.” (I Regret Almost Everything - Keith McNally)

Nemtsov

Boris …. (1959–2015) was a Russian physicist and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. In June 2017, five Chechnya-born men were found guilty in a Moscow court for agreeing to kill Nemtsov in exchange for 15 million rubles (US $253,000); the identity of the person who hired them remains unknown.

Gestation

“The …. is the stage most likely to be misread as idleness.” (Quiet Work - Eleanor Vass)

(This acrostic is offered in thanks to Virginia and Robin White, who allowed us to stay for two weeks in their home near Boris Nemtsov Place, a short walk from Highgate Cemetery in London, England. It is made possible by Virginia’s gift of the book.)

“I try now to observe my own ending, this series of experiments conducted upon myself continues. So far the modifications are external. I think that through the crevices I see and touch the indestructible foundation.”

Yeti

In Monsters, Inc., the … is a banished monster who lives in the Himalayas. He was exiled from Monstropolis, probably for tampering with mail. He dislikes being called the “Abominable Snowman” and prefers to be called the “Adorable Snowman.”

Ockendon

The name … likely originates from the Old English Woccan and dūn, meaning “Wocca’s hill,” referring to a hill associated with a Saxon named Wocca. The place name is recorded as Wokindon in 1230.

Ugolino

“The first written record of Castiglione … is inked on sheepskin in a massive leather-bound book found in the archives of Perugia.” 
(Jen Vickers)

Rhododendron

“The …s sprawled their unruly heads against the windows, and in the little clearing where the drive swept round the final bend they stood in a monstrous regiment.” (Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier)

Chrysanthemum

“The …s were so magnificently assertive, were so red, so fresh, that they had the effect of an electric shock.” (Kew Gardens – Virginia Woolf)

Effect

“The whole .... is peculiarly soft and spirit-like, for there is no marked edge or outline. How could you draw the outline of these snowy fingers seen against the fog, without exaggeration? (Thoreau and the Language of Trees - Richard Higgins)

None such

“How to keep—is there any any, is there …, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty from vanishing away?” (The Golden Echo – Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Axis

The Earth’s tilt on its … is thought to be the result of a massive collision early in its history with a Mars-sized object called Theia. This impact is also believed to have led to the formation of the Moon. The tilt is the primary reason for Earth’s seasons.

Rheostat

Charles Wheatstone, Britain’s great Victorian inventor, invented the … in 1832.

Merope

… Gaunt, the mother of Lord Voldemort, is a witch from a prominent wizarding family and is known for having had a difficult life. She used a love potion on the muggle Tom Riddle Sr. to become pregnant with Voldemort.

Expedition

“The geology of this region is very interesting; I am tempted to give a short sketch of the … to the Rio Santa Cruz, where the river has cut through the plains and exposed the underlying formations.” (The Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin)

Myth

“It is still a …ical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. The hope is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that man and his products count.”
(The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker)

Out

“…, ..,, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth – William Shakespeare)

Islington

“The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey back I could not account for. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at between three and four o’clock in the morning, into …” (Bleak House – Charles Dickens)

Rift

“The Olorgesailie people disappeared from the scene about two hundred thousand years ago when the lake dried up and the … Valley started to become the hot and challenging place it is today. Things would never be the same again.” (A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson)

Stout

“He drank at one draught, deliberately, all the dear liquid. Clean. Bitter too. The sweet tang of faintly scented urine. He drank without stopping his … down to the mid G on the glass.” (Ulysses – James Joyce)

Oval

.…tine, originally known as Ovomaltine, was invented in 1904 by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Wander in Bern, Switzerland. It was initially developed as a nutritional supplement to combat malnutrition.

Fishwife

“A Billingsgate … might be described as a Carrie Bradshaw of her day—she drank, she smoked, she spent her own money on whatever she wanted to spend it on. Over the centuries they survived plagues, civil wars and fires, but one thing they couldn’t survive was the Victorians.” (Laura Miller)

Hesitate

“And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to … before he made her an offer.” (Middlemarch – George Eliot)

Accidents

The discovery of penicillin is one of the great … of history. While Alexander Fleming’s work on bacteria led him to the discovery, it was the unintended contamination of a petri dish with mold that ultimately revealed penicillin’s antibacterial properties.

Duress

“The French cardinals gathered in Anagni and planned revolt. On August 9, 1378, they issued a manifesto declaring Urban’s election invalid as having been made under … of the Roman mob.”(The Renaissance – Will Durant)

Rewritten

"Ernest Hemingway’s philosophy—“writing is rewriting”— has no doubt been … many times over." (E. Lee Walker)

Intersect

“A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding …s and illuminates the rest of one’s life.” (Bill deBuys)

Achieve

“Move him into the sun. Are limbs so dear-…d, are sides full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall?” (Futility – Wilfred Owen)

Nubbin

“There once was a woman from Dublin,
                   she had a cute doggie named .…,
                   he barked in the rain,
                   he was really a pain,
                   but not nearly as much as her husband.”

(Composed while recovering from Covid during our two-week stay in Ben and Merope Beddard's beautiful London home in Islington on Ockendon Road - Jul 16, 2025)

“Memory is fragile, the space of a single life so brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events. We can’t gauge the consequences of our acts. We believe in the fiction of time.”

Towboat

A … pushing burdens upriver.

Humaneness

The fragile thread of ... fraying when cruelty reigns.

Eyewitness

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing a second time. I am an … to their deaths. I owe them this testimony.” (Night - Elie Wiesel)

Helpless

To stand …, watching consequences unfold without the power to alter them.

Overwhelming

The … rush that leaves memory staggered and grasping at fragments.

Unconscionable

“with a wanton and …. cruelty.” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass)

See

“To … a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.” (Auguries of Innocence - William Blake)

Effective

“The system was ….: everyone was afraid, everyone lied, and everyone was guilty.” (The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

Opaque

“And somehow it was …. to his understanding.” (1984 - George Orwell)

Foggiest

“I haven’t the … idea what is going on,” I said truthfully. (The Quiet American - Graham Greene)

Takeaway

“The … from my grief was this: you do not get over it, you just carry it.” (The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion)

Hostage

“We don’t realize it until we are taken ….” (I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai)

Estimate

“There is no way to … the number of lives that have been lost at sea.” (The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger)

Stiffen

“I saw the body …, jerk, and then lie still.” (A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway)

Pinochet

Augusto José Ramón …. Ugarte (1915–2006), dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. He persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics resulting in the executions of up to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000, and the torture of tens of thousands.

Ineffective

“But if the last page has been written by someone else, then the whole book is worthless, ….” (Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler)

Rhetoric

“…. is a part of politics, the art of persuading the multitude by the use of speech.” (De Inventione - Cicero)

Irreconcilable

“The racial tensions are not about to be resolved because the root of the matter is ….” (The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin)

Technique

“The fact is that soon everyone improvises a … for himself in order to survive.” (If This Is a Man / Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi)

Segregate

“…. substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” (Letter from Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King Jr.)

(Composed on my way to Italy - April 27, 2025)

"We humbly beg God's forgiveness and ask pardon if our brethren feel injured. It had been a thousand years since the split between Catholics and the Orthodox, more than four centuries since the break with Protestants."

For John Thornton (1966–2025)

Friend. Founder. Fierce believer in truth.

This acrostic is in honor of you.

You built things that mattered.

You saw journalism as a public good and made it real.

You gave others a platform to speak.

Proof

“As this book will document, there is clear .... that John Paul and Benedict joined in a wide-ranging conspiracy to shield child molesters from justice.” (Book - Author)

Headstrong

“The life of an intelligent, .... woman in 9th-century Europe, the kind of woman who might have dared such an adventure in an era when obedience was a woman’s most admired trait”  (Pope Joan - Donna Cross)

Infallible

“Küng argued that the concept of an ... pope had never been valid and was imposed in 1870 only because of the bullying of Pius IX.” (Book - Author)

Lust's

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, but .... effect is tempest after sun." (Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare)

Invertebrates

“They were moral ...., spineless before power and silent in the face of sin, choosing institution over integrity.” (Papal Sin - Garry Wills)

Profess

“Many ... faith, but few are willing to carry its burden when it demands truth over tradition." (Constantine’s Sword - James Carroll)

Share

"Jesus. We really do .... the same brain.  I developed a minor obsession with Amor Towles a year or so ago."   (Text message from John Thornton to Lee Walker)

Hammerheaded

“Only the most ... ideologues could look at centuries of suffering and still insist the Church had never erred.” (God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens)

Eucharist

“The wine was cheap, the .... wafer stale, but somehow the mystery held—God smuggled in under cover of carbs.” (Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott)

Newsboys

“The ... cried the scandals on street corners while the bishops stayed silent in cathedrals—truth shouted by children, buried by men in robes.” (“The Boys on the Steps” - Maureen Dowd)

Oxygenated

“In that moment, it felt like the whole Church took one deep, ... breath—truth had finally been spoken aloud.” (Breath of Grace - Mary Gordon)

Neighbor

“The command to love one’s ... becomes a scandal when the Church cannot protect the children next door.” (The Givenness of Things - Marilynne Robinson)

John Thornton

(1966-2025) the founder of The Texas Tribune and one of the most vital and influential leaders in nonprofit journalism 

Eunuchs

“In the courts of kings and cathedrals alike, the ... stood silent—trusted with access, stripped of power, watching it all unfold.” (The Master’s Chamber - Colm Tóibín)

Seedbed

“The Church was meant to be the ... of grace; instead, it too often became the greenhouse of guilt, shielding rot from the light.” (Learning to Walk in the Dark = Barbara Brown Taylor)

Unwonted 

“In the silence of the confessional, it was an ... courage that first named what others had only whispered.” (Confessions of a Quiet Country - Elizabeth Strout)

Strikebreak 

“To defend the institution, they crossed the line—every silence, every sealed file a spiritual ... against the faithful.” (Lead Us Not into Temptation - Jason Berry)

Wichita

John Thornton was born in ...., Kansas in 1966. 

Enfant 

“The Church claimed to serve the ... Jésus, yet it failed the ....s in its pews—sacrificing flesh to preserve façade.” (Les Voix Étouffées - Laurent Gaudé)

Putted 

“While Rome burned, they ... through PR talking points like weekend golfers—measured, mannered, missing the hole entirely.” (Par for the Clergy - Frank Bruni)

Theocratic 

“What began as a movement of the heart calcified into a ... machine—shielding authority, resisting reform, and punishing truth.” (Gods and Powers - Elaine Pagels)

"I had trained myself to set any such notions aside in order to develop an objective analytical understanding of nature. The terrain was animate, sentient, creative. It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud."

Mist

"The morning light pours down through the tall trees onto the open space in front of the cabin, sunbeams everywhere and... floating like freshly minted souls." (Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami)

Basalt

"This process created the smooth...ic lava plains of the moon, including the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module.... was thus the first rock humans encountered on another world." (Book - Author)

Jurassic

"But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names began to creep in from all over.... refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains." (A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition - Bill Bryson)

Outfit

"We now know that the separate bookkeeping devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, and similar...s was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice president and the stewards of his policies." (Moral Imagination - David Bromwich)

Redden

"I also collected a suspiciously light cynthia moth cocoon. My fingers were stiff and ....ed with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, "Carry Kleenex." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard)

Norway

"In 1905, John Munro Longyear was prospecting in a remote part of northern... with an eye toward opening a new iron range. But he needed coal for smelting, the nearest coalfields were on Svalbard-vestiges of an ancient tropical forest on those polar islands" (Timefulness - Author)

Enjoyed

"I am willing to grant that some groups may have.... an edge but I suspect that the second interpretation grasps a central truth about evolution. The Burgess Shale promotes a radical view of evolutionary pathways and predictability." (Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould)

Rhyolite

"There are three major tectonic settings where granite (and its volcanic equivalent, ....) is forming on Earth today: continental arcs such as the Cascades or Andes; continental rift zones like the East African rift; and continental hotspots like Yellowstone." (Book - Author)

Unsteady

"The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care-this black hole set within blue-black ice-conscious of our footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled." (Underland - Robert Macfarlane)

Devastated

"It's impossible to give anything close to a full account of the various species, genera, families, and even whole orders that went extinct at the K-T boundary. Mammals' ranks were....; something like two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary." (The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert)

Tradition

“The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk - chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the....al protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother's body." (Silent Spring - Rachel Carson)

Uranium

"uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be..... But if it wasn't...., what was it?" (The Periodic Table - Primo Levi)

Rainwater

"The tightly folded Appalachians are something like the ribs of a washboard. In the Paleozoic era, when the tectonic washboard was made and repeatedly lifted from the east, falling... gathering in streams found its way westward across the ribs." (In Suspect Terrain - John McPhee)

Novena

"Whole devotions dropped from use, indulgences (Luther's old point of contention), ....s, even the Mass, the central and most stable shared act of the church, had become unrecognizable-a thing of guitars instead of the organ, of English instead of Latin, of youth-culture fads instead of ancient rites." (Bare Ruined Choirs - Garry Wills)

Iridium

"We then had a mystery: the origin of the clay layer... appeared to be extraterrestrial. We first guessed that it had come from a nearby supernova explosion. Some astrophysicists had proposed that the K/T extinction had been triggered by such an explosion" (Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis W. Alvarez)

Neotectonics

"But the curriculum was still anchored in the logic of nineteenth-century museums. The emerging fields of geochemistry, ...., and climate science were simply absent, or at best, wedged in as footnotes on the last day of traditional courses." (Book - Author)

Gentle

"Combining the two extreme ends of physics-cosmology, the study of the universe, and quantum mechanics, the study of atomic and subatomic systems-is ambitious by any standard. But that hasn't stopped some distinguished physicists from working on the topic. First up was John Wheeler in the 1960s, who argued that quantum uncertainty would fuzz out the singularity, replacing the infinite curvature of spacetime with something....r and more complex." (The Goldilocks Enigma - Paul Davies)

Thousand

"We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years or, at most, decades to complete. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between....s and millions of decades to complete. All our intuitive judgements of what is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude. Our well-tuned apparatus of scepticism and subjective probability-theory misfires by huge margins, because it is tuned-Ironically, by evolution itself - to work within a lifetime of a few decades. It requires effort of the imagination to escape from the prison of familiar timescale" (The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins)

Ophiolites

"Most exposures of peridotite and serpentinite occur in rare places around the globe, where subduction somehow went awry and slabs of oceanic lithosphere were thrust onto continental crust. These "misshelved" rock complexes are called...., and famous examples occur in Newfoundland, Northern California, Oman, and Cyprus." (Book - Author)

Stealth

"The numbers showed a pattern: tiny changes grew quietly until they took over the whole system. Scientists had to rethink what it meant to predict anything at all." (Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick)

Tachylyte

"Pseudo..... is a dark, glassy rock formed when frictional melting occurs along a fault during an earthquake. Even many geologists find its name befuddling because they've never heard of "true".... Despite its obscure name, however, pseudo.... rewards study because they are the closest we can get to witnessing the deep origins of earthquakes." (Book - Author)

Overtaken

"Nature's own rhythms have been.... by human activities. What once took millennia now happens in decades." (The End of Nature - Bill McKibben)

NAFTA

"Companies found they could move their plants across the border under .... and leave U.S. environmental regulations behind at the Rio Grande." (Living Downstream - Sandra Steingraber)

Estate

"In Staffordshire, on the... of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man" (The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin)

"Companies that strive to maximize engagement by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. Social media companies hooked children by designing a firehose of addictive content."

Hyper

"When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit....activity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games" (Book - Author)

Ankle

"My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, no hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, ungart'red, and down-gyved to his.... (Hamlet - Shakespeare)

Introvert

"The....'s way of being in the world this deep, sustained attention to inner experience-represents not a retreat from reality but rather a different, equally vatid way of processing it. I am reminded of Temple Grandin's observation that her autism allowed her to see what others missed." (An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks)

Dostoevsky

"The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key" (Notes from the Underground - ....)

Took

"It... considerable strength of mind to refuse the endless circus of distraction, to choose instead the harder path of genuine attention." (Upstream - Mary Oliver)

Triggering

"The constant notifications were... a cascade of interruptions, each ping cutting a thought before it could fully form." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)

Hazy

"Memory grows... in the digital age-not from age or illness, but from our outsourcing of recall to our devices." (The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts)

Enlist

"Social media platforms... our natural desires for connection and validation, turning them into engines of anxiety." (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts - Jaron Lanier)

Accident

"By pure... we created tools that perfectly exploit our brain's vulnerability to distraction." (Irresistible - Adam Alter)

Nonacceptance

"The... of constant digital interruption has become our era's small act of rebellion." (How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell)

Xenophobic

"The... impulse to reject unfamiliar perspectives finds perfect in our personalized news feeds." (#Republic - Cass Sunstein)

Ices

"The mind... up when oversaturated with digital stimutt, losing its natural fluidity of thought." (Come Home - Maryanne Wolf-Reader)

Onomatopoela

"The... of digital life-ping, swish, ding-colonizes our soundscape, sach artificial word-sound tugging at our attention." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)

Unfaithful

"Memory becomes... to lived experience when we trust our devices to do our remembering." (Alone Together - Sherry Turkle)

Sacrificed

"What gets... first is the very thing we need most: the capacity for sustained attention." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)

Giggle

"Coming from who knows what house dance, there ghosted past us two of the Donnellan sisters. A... bubbled out of one of them and the other hooked her arm and hurried them past." (This Is Happiness - Niall Williams)

Emoted

"Children who primarily... through digital interfaces showed marked differences in reading real human expressions." (The Big Disconnect - Catherine Steiner-Adair)

Newsweek

"As.... shifted to digital, the weekly rhythm of reflection gave way to the constant scroll." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)

Edifies

"What genuinely... comes not from screens but from slow, sustained engagement with ideas." (Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf)

Rigged

"The game is... from the start: apps designed not to satisfy but to create endless craving." (Adam Alter - Irresistible)

Accomplish

"The need to ... something real grows more urgent as our lives become increasingly virtual." (William Powers - Hamlet's BlackBerry)

Time

.... Magazine's shift to digital marked another victory of the immediate over the Important." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)

Idiom

"The digital age steamrolls over every... of face-to-face conversation, replacing subtle expressions with standardized reactions." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)

Obsess

"Students increasingly... over metrics - followers, likes, views - treating these digital signals as measures of self-worth." (It's Complicated - Danah Boyd)

Nymph

"Like a... vanishing at dawn, our capacity for wonder dissolves in the blue light of screens." (Last Child in the Woods - Richard Louv)