In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Luck

Statistics distinguishes three sorts of luck,

circumstantial, resultant, and constitutive:

(a) being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, (b) the outcome, and (c) by fortunate or unfortunate context, such as the asteroid that killed the flightless dinosaurs sixty-six odd million years ago.

As usual, philosophy's diction distracts!

What was the luck we really had?

Why me, why you? Was it good or bad?

What did we do, and was it fun?

Perhaps luck is feeling, feeling lucky,

not just a collage of raw facts?

With Sophocles, I’d be content, if the dinosaurs came through,

being myself a sentient thunder lizard

or perhaps a blue jay in a yew

or tree best suited to a blue jay's gizzard.

Luck is “the operation of chance, taken personally."

it's said, and personally, as far as I'm concerned, looks after me.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently. The writer, Sir David Spiegelhalter, is emeritus professor of statistics at Cambridge and the author of The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (London: Pelican Books, 2024).

"Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best," the Chorus declares in Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus.

Roots

“All this has been driven largely by the sinking of roots.”—Thomas Halliday, Otherlands

A rhizosphere, or “world of roots,”*

underlies lives that rising raise

their arms toward a star that shoots

or rains down rays on which to graze.

The thralls of replicating life

so stuff themselves with solar meat,

and learn to thrust in mutual strife,

until, grown old in self-defeat,

their flesh is food that others eat,

and fuel a growing human swarm

will burn in winter to keep warm.

Those also have a rhizosphere,

although it’s what they have to fear,

with roots that murder growing near.

*Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (New York: Random House, 2023), on the Carboniferous era, 309 million years ago, p. 189.