[A]lmost everything we think we know about angels is not in the Bible and was invented in the Middle Ages. And unlike any other religion, the Church was obsessed with the material reality of these incorporeal beings⁠⁠—do angels eat? If they have no tongue, how do they speak or sing the praises of God? Do they have a memory? How do they get from one place to another?

E. Weinberger, in the city of light review

All this delay and empty space, day after day, might stem from rhetorical vertigo. Tertiary causes include eclectic reading, lack of sleep, and a millennialist’s Armageddon-imminent sense of dread (not mine, but in the culture at large), which dread I recognize to be just empty noise, but somehow I got louder more recently.

Not nostalgic for the Peace Corp Massachusetts Ivy League liberalism and the dopey, saccharine naïveté that drew coherence in the belief that just stating the truth is all that is required. But somewhat nostalgic for the style and panache with which they pulled it off. Just for the lewks, then.

Travel alongside men in flip flops who somehow go into and out of a restroom at an airport and don’t garrote themselves from shame, or else get old enough, and somehow style isn’t just empty semiotics, but an attempt to make a settlement with the world as it is.

Don’t sleep on soft ambient lamp lighting and high concept disruption of the shipping industry, with sails and nuclear as the one and true way.

All of which is to say . . . We’re back.