Log24

David Brooks in The New York Times  Sunday  Review   today —

" 'In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology 
has warned us,' Annie Dillard writes in 'Teaching a Stone to Talk.' 
'But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them
farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate 
or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys
the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power
for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for
each other.' "

Annie Dillard on the legendary philosopher's stone —

“… if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima ,
absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute
at base, then the circle is unbroken.  And it is…. Holy the Firm is
in short the philosopher’s stone.”

See also "The Thing and I."