Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams - while they are evaporating.

Whether advanced by military or by other means, two things are remarkable about tobacco’s conquest of Europe and Asia during the seventeenth century.

“Paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid.”

August has a certain fiery & sultry quality of her own, which fades before her last days of the month are over. September has mellowed whatever there was of roughness in her heat: the days are more perfect, but less vigorous. The summer in fact is on the wane; peacefully fading like some brilliant spot of light. The colours of the sunset are everywhere. When the sun sets you may see from this window little sparks of light scattered among the sandhills where no houses themselves are visible; the windows are thus emblazoned by the sun.

One should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down. We are here for this — to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it.

And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indiffreence to time.

To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.

This was only the beginning. During the next few weeks, thanks to the miracle of modern radio-telemetry, the nation's TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President's physical and mental functions. His brave, if tremulous, heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the twenty-eight feet he had walked in the rose garden, the calorie count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain-scan, read-outs of his kidney, liver and lung function. In addition, there was a daunting sequence of personality and IQ tests, all designed to reassure the American public that the man at the helm of the free world was more than equal to the daunting tasks that faced him across the Oval Office desk.