The classrooms and beer gardens were full of young Germans like himself, who debated the doings of Bismarck, composed eulogies of Darwin, sang Rabelaisian songs in bad Latin, kept dogs, wore ribbons on their walking sticks, fought duels, and drank unlimited steins of pale beer.

Seen from afar, the mulberry rose tall and spread broadly like a carriage canopy.  When playing beneath the tree with the boys in the hamlet, young Xuande often boasted, “When I’m the Son of Heaven, my chariot will have a canopy like this.”

In 1931 the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken’s soul after he had called the state the “apex of moronia.”

[Isaac Newton] was a mathematician, which is mostly hogwash, too. Imagine measuring infinity! That’s a laugh.

The air, which had been alive as an eel bath with brilliant unchosen words, became abruptly quite dead.  Sensing it, on a queer Celtic wavelength of his own, O’LiamRoe felt his skin prick.

Two players could play using only their knights, and have them dance pointlessly around each other.  After even a huge number of moves, there will be no reason to assume from the position that one player has an advantage over the other, so the knights could continue to dance until one or both players die (though this in itself could be considered a condition of finiteness if in the event of a death, the game were considered finished in some way).

I propose a New Year’s Resolution, not for myself, but for the world.

Let us, all together, make 2016 the Year of Reason, when logic came back from its long exile in human affairs and was restored to its proper throne in the human soul.

Let emotion, passion, hysteria, wishful thinking, be reduced, once again, to their proper subordinate station, no longer running wild, but domesticated.

Let the arrogant and blank denial of reality which is the hallmark of the modern age be exiled from human discourse, and returned to its proper place in Bedlam.

Any feminist reading these words must be elated, yet doubtful, for no doubt she thinks, “But feminism, the doctrine that holds men and women to be equal in the eyes of the law, is as conformable to reason as the opening of the Declaration of Independence! A return to reason would not just favor our cause, but coronate it with instant victory, would it not?”

No, miss.

It is not that the politically correct actually want to see their women in trash bags, and their gay voters thrown off rooftops; it is just that they have no concern for spiritual reality at all.

A nameless inertia hangs over those two, alternating with fits of unreasonable wrath, stripping them of any will or desire to prepare creditable, affectionate food or even to keep the bent silverware on the tables spotless and clean as a whistle.

 The characters have terribly corny names like “Nicolae Carpathia” and “Buck Stevens”, which I would think was “cool”, if I were still a fetus.