Look at the universe: are you overwhelmed or amazed?

This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifying insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so  many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel  amazed and fortunate to be here.

On the whole, though, I take the  side of amazement.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 234

Does an administrator have to read the statutes?

One of the ablest administrators that it was my good fortune to know, I believe, never read a least more than casually, the statutes that he translated into reality. He assumed that they gave him power to deal with the broad problems of an industry, and upon that understanding he sought his own solutions.

James M. Landis, The Administrative Process 75 (Yale Univ. Press 1938), quoted in Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960, at 217 (Oxford Univ. Press 1992)

Grieving for the future

Grief confuses us by  spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend —that everything  that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 74

Grief is boring

Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with  my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61

Ketchup-Bottle Type of Argument

We find this to be a ketchup-bottle type of argument: it looks quite full, but it is remarkably difficult to get anything useful out of it.

Judge Bruce M. Selya, The Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College, 889 F.2d 13, 18 (1st Cir. 1989)

Trollope, Cross-Examined

    Codd [a barrister] was not always so lucky. He once defended a man for stealing from a post-office, and cross-examined one of the prosecution witnesses.

    "What is your occupation?"

    "A supervisor of the Post Office," said Anthony Trollope.

    "And have you also written a book called Barchester Towers?"

    The witness agreed.

    "Was there a word of truth in that book from beginning to end?"

    "It was a work of fiction", said Trollope.

    "Fiction or not," said Codd relentlessly, "was there a word of truth in it from beginning to end?"

    "Well, if you put it that way," said Trollope, "there was not."

    Codd sat down in triumph. He invited the jury in due course to consider whether they could possibly convict on the evidence of a man like that.

    They could and did. But you can never tell with juries.

R. G. Hamilton, All Jangle and Riot: A Barrister's History of the Bar (Abingdon, Oxon.: Professional Books, 1986), p. 274

Nuclear Power’s Big Downside

Splitting atoms to boil water was never a good idea. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, and 80 years into the nuclear age, we still have no idea what to do with these lethal byproducts.

Thomas Bass, The Bomb Next Door, American Scholar, Summer 2022, at 33, 34.