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• Acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time

  I am reading When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, and he writes about the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, describing his ability to concentrate for long hours: He could begin …

• The shimmering

  Several months ago, while reading Joan Didion’s essay Why I Write, I was surprised to read how certain images “shimmer around the edges” for her. She writes that she has these images in her mind—where the figure …