After-Orts #25
Where Does a Candle Go When It Burns?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/randall-munroe-candle-xkcd.html
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_History_of_a_Candle
and especially
http://www.engineerguy.com/faraday/pdf/faraday-chemical-history-complete.pdf
What time is it? What day is it? What did we do in October? Why are we standing in front of the refrigerator staring at an old clove of garlic? Just recently I myself spent half an hour struggling to retrieve a word from the faulty memory system that has replaced my prepandemic brain. (‘Institution.’ That was the word.) Sometimes, when I try to write a simple email, I feel I’m just pushing disjointed words around, like peas on a plate, hoping they will eventually coalesce into sentences.
— Sarah Lyall, We Have All Hit a Wall, NYT, April 3, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/business/pandemic-burnout-productivity.html
Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives.
-- David Whyte, Consolations