age
Never any place I was meant to be
Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.
This was never any place I was meant to be.
A timeless space
Our culture reveres youth, aspires to agelessness and is frightened by signs of age, wear and decay. As a consequence of this obsession, and the qualities of our man-made materials, contemporary environments have lost their capacity to contain and communicate traces of time. Our buildings often seem to exist in a timeless space without contact with the past or confidence for the future.
The complexity and the gray
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
Putting Thought Into Things
An Essay by Oliver ReichensteinBuilding structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.
You're living in your very last house
A Song by Lo-Fang
The Pleasure of Observing
Abbreviation
I generally do not like to abbreviate behavioral notes. An important detail may be ignored or considered irrelevant and discarded because it lacks a discrete category on the list. It is often an anecdotal event that offers special insight.
Beyond dry facts
If one has a personal knowledge of the individual animals being studied, observations in field notes cease to be impersonal, and an observer’s empathy can lead beyond dry facts to better intuition and insight.
A study should persist
Since we cannot interview the subject, we can only infer the past from the present. Ideally, a study should persist for at least the life span of an animal.
Precious intangible values
The “precious intangible values” of this wilderness.
Independent fragments of existence
You cannot divide me into independent fragments of existence.
— The Last Panda, 1993
Panda routes
A detailed route of a panda foraging on bamboo shoots, showing the number of shoots eaten and droppings deposited (black spots) on May 31, 1982.