Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch (via):

When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.

And now we may need to lie down

“Mass extinction events seem to occur about once every 26 million years…. One theory is that this is the interval between instances of the solar system, rotating around the centre of our galaxy, passing through one of the galactic spiral arms…”

— Nick Wray, LRB Letters (11.20.25)

Anthony Lane on Bunny Lang is, as they say, self-recommending. (I’m tempted to say that Anthony Lane on any subject fits that bill.) If you need a push, look at the judo he does with “chestnut” here, in a riff on Lang’s “Caraway seeds on my tongue:”

What stirs the last phrase is an impatience with cliché. We are so accustomed to hearing sex extolled as “spicy” that it needs someone as brisk as Lang to break the habit. You can imagine her asking, “Well, what spice? Was it a nutmeg kiss, or a cinnamon quickie, or what?” Caraway gets rid of the old chestnut.