Stylus Quotes

Thirty minutes later we were in Aunt Gene's carriage, Pam compulsively adjusting her bonnet, me meditating upon all of the ways it might be possible to kill myself with the in-cab stylus.

Saepa stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturas. (Turn the stylus [to erase] often if you would write something worthy of being reread.)

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)

It wasn’t just 1) the artwork and sleeve notes on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a hidden track, or a little message carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the quality of sound. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, “Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”) It wasn’t even 4) the ritual of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the journey. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to the next, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to get up off your arse and take part.

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves—this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.

I start trembling at the very thought of the unplanned and unknown, but inevitable and unstoppable force with which parents leave traces in their children that, like traces of branding, can never be erased. The outlines of parental will and fear are written with a white-hot stylus in the souls of the children who are helpless and ignorant of what is happening to them. We need a whole life to find and decipher the branded text and we can never be sure we have understood it.

Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.

I wish the earth would open up and swallow me whole. Come to think of it, if I could reach my stylus I could make that happen.

Then in one savage, sharp motion, he’s twisting and thrusting the stylus upward, through his neck and deep into his brain.

He had his DS balanced on his blue-jeaned knees and was poking away at it industriously with the stylus. “Score,” he said as she came up the steps. “I’m kicking butt at Mario Kart.” Clary

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

The stylus of time was stricken. The miners were dead. The mines had closed, after the veins went dry of silver. The miners were below the ground in Lone Hill Cemetery. — Ivy. ( told at Telluride Ski Area )

Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city. As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure. To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not. The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun.

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters. Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought. The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.

Sometimes Leonardo used a pen on such face-hunting excursions, and when that was not practical in an outdoor setting he used a stylus. The sharp silverpoint of the stylus made lines on paper that had been coated with ground chicken bones, soot, or other chalky powders, sometimes colored with pulverized minerals. The metal point oxidized this coating, producing silvery gray lines. He also occasionally used chalk, charcoal, or lead. As was his nature, he was constantly experimenting with drawing methods. 23

Every week Dr. Stein asked, “What do you see out the window?” Her stylus was never on camera, but Nedda could hear it sliding across a tablet. It was difficult to explain what she saw, harder still to parse its meaning. Space between stars made for easy misery, contemplating how small you were when faced with the universe. Though he was mission commander, Amit Singh looked out as little as possible, preferring star maps, feeds from the telescopes, and data from the probes and terraformers. He remained intent on viewing himself as a person and not a single cell in an organism the size of the universe. Nedda liked feeling small. “Endless space is endless potential,” she’d told Dr. Stein. It was good to sound hopeful. It was trickier to explain that she was looking for light, picking it apart, trying to sense the different wavelengths, searching for the familiar. There was light in the black, on its way to and from distant planets, light from stars crashing into one another, meeting in the space between. Light carried thoughts and hopes, the essence of what made everyone.

A stylus was a metal-tipped drawing instrument widely used by artists before the invention of the pencil (graphite was not discovered until in 1504, and the wooden-cased graphite pencil appeared only in the second half of the seventeenth century). For drawing with a stylus, artists used paper specially coated with a ground made from, among other things, powdered bone. One fifteenth-century recipe recommended incinerated table scraps, such as chicken wings, whose ground-up ashes were sprinkled thinly on the paper or parchment and then brushed off with a hare’s foot.44 With the paper thus prepared, the artist went to work on its granular surface with his stylus, which was usually made from silver and sharpened to a point, and which, as it was drawn across the surface, left particles behind; these traces quickly oxidized, producing delicate lines of silvery gray.

We should do this on computer," she said, chalking it carefully for the eighty-ninth time. "With a drawing pad." "Nonsense. You're lucky I don't make you inscribe it with a stylus on a wax tablet, like the old days," Myrnin snorted. "Children. Spoiled children, always playing with the shinest toy." "Computers are more efficient!" "I can perform calculations on that abacus faster than you can solve them on your computer," Myrnin sneered. Okay, now he was pissing her off. "Prove it!" "What?" "Prove it." She backed off on her tone, but Myrnin wasn't looking angry; he was looking strangely interested. He stared at her for a second in silence, and then he got the biggest, oddest smile she'd ever seen on the face of a vampire. "All right," he said. "A contest. Computer versus abacus." She wasn't at all sure now that was a good idea, even if it had been her idea, essentially. "Um -- what do I win?" More importantly, what do I lose? Making bargains was a way of life in Morganville, and it was a lot like making deals with man-eating fairies. Better be careful what you ask for. "Your freedom," he said solemnly. His eyes were wide and guileless, his too-young face shining with honesty. "I will tell Amelie you were not suited to the work. She'll let you go about your life, such as it is." Good prize. Too good. Claire swallowed hard. "And if I lose?" "Then I eat you," Myrnin said.

The outlines of parental will and fear are written with a white-hot stylus in the souls of the children who are helpless and ignorant of what is happening to them. We need a whole life to find and decipher the branded text and we can never be sure we have understood it.

Most of Cicero’s letters were written in ink on paper or parchment with a reed pen; a few on tablets of wood or ivory covered with wax, the marks being cut with a stylus. The earlier letters he wrote with his own hand, the later were, except in rare cases, dictated to a secretary. There was, of course, no postal service, so the epistles were carried by private messengers or by the couriers who were constantly traveling between the provincial officials and the capital.

RAND Tablet, a kind of high-tech sketch pad that a user could write or draw on with a stylus, with the results then appearing on a CRT display.

access the

The author sees Luke's loyalty to the apostle Paul "depicted architecturally in the great church at Rome known as St. Paul Outside the Walls. There, a statue of Luke holding a writing stylus commemorates not only his work as a Gospel author but his faithfulness to Paul.

The world of storytelling was changing dramatically around Enoch. The new visual communication called “cuneiform” was overtaking the traditional oral recitation of verse. Scribes created cuneiform as a codified physical expression of language, using utensils to make impressions on clay tablets. The scribes wanted to keep a tangible account of personal and public wealth that could not be challenged by verbal lies or faulty memory. Using handheld styluses pressed into the clay, they could list objects owned by the ruler and how many he possessed. It had started out as pictographs of cows, gold, wheat, wood, and other belongings. It had evolved into an abstract system of symbols that could be rapidly copied or communicated in a legal dispute.

The characteristic wedge feature is a direct consequence of impressing the signs with a straight-edged writing tool in contrast to drawing with a point, and it is this that led the nineteenth-century decipherers to name the script cuneiform, derived from the Latin cuneus, ‘wedge’. Each application of the edge of the stylus-tip left a line ending in a wedge-head, be it the top of a vertical, the left end of a horizontal wedge, or a diagonal produced by impressing the corner of the stylus.

The most advanced phones are called smartphones. They are definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder to use. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not. How do you solve this? We solved it in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a screen that could display anything. What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. We don’t want to carry around a mouse. We’re going to use a stylus. No. You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them. We’re going to use our fingers.

His whole body was drenched in sweat. He lifted his hands in agony. “I can do no more! I cannot bear the thought of Israel being ground under the feet of God!” Moses wept and then after a long time he prayed, “God, give me some hope that I may give it to your people.” For a long time it was silent. Then God spoke again. Moses picked up his stylus and began to write to the people. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession.

Moses continued writing under the direction of God, but finally he rose up and put away the writing equipment, the ink and the stylus, and the parchment. He put the parchment with others upon which he had let the ink dry, and now he gathered them all together, holding them with trembling hands. These were the records God had given him. Even going back to the story of Adam and Eve and tracing the history of God’s dealing with men. This holy book that Moses had written with his own hand would perish, but he had trained the scribes of Israel to make copies of his work and to take monumental efforts to keep the text exactly as God had given it to Moses himself.

In a sense, the recording stylus and its reverse component have defeated time. Up until a little more than a generation ago, the sound of a word once uttered, a violin note once played, were possible treasures dropped into the none too safe repository of human memory; but the same sounds transferred to a wax or plastic or film or wire can live and vibrate again fifteen minutes or fifty years from now.

Proving that styluses never go out of fashion, sales of vinyl record albums rocketed to 9.2m in America last year, the most since 1993. Although that represented only around 4% of total albums sold, the growth of vinyl is in sharp contrast to the decline in music downloaded through various online stores, as more people switch to music-streaming services. Vinyl has increased in popularity partly as a collector’s item. Fans can keep their LPs in mint condition by listening to the music on free downloads that come with the album package.

If you have any questions, your PDA can port into the Henry Hudson information system and use the AI interface to assist you; just use your stylus to write the question or speak it into your PDA’s microphone.

Multiculturalism (and, we would contend, social justice) has too often been transformed into a code word in contemporary political jargon that has been grossly invoked in order to divert attention from the racism and social injustice in this country and the ways differences are demonized (McLaren, 1995).

wax stylus

I get a vivid image of Belle curled up on a sofa in her parents’ flat with our questionnaire on an iPad, her tiger eyes widening in disbelief or arousal, that plump lower lip cushioning the stylus as she reads the option upon option of pure filth that awaits her. It’s less a menu than a dirty, decadent smorgasbord for her to feast on.

I’m sorry, darling. What are you sorry about? Being a shit mother. This is something she has said and worried about my whole adult life. Sometimes she makes herself a victim of the thought and sometimes it carries a deep plea for forgiveness. I had always been exasperated by the statement and felt it asked me to repeatedly qualify that there had been shit moments of selfishness that accompany any human, mother or not, but that she, in all honesty, was not a shit mother. There are clearly certain thoughts that keep playing through a life, though, like songs on repeat. They are for you, and you alone and however much you try to involve other people in them, they really have nothing to do with anyone but yourself. Here, in whatever end-of-life moment we are in, it is suddenly necessary to lay those thoughts to rest. Take the stylus off the record, delete the playlist. There’s nothing to be sorry about, Mum. So what if you were, what if it were true? Does it matter? Because here we are together, talking . . . together. I love you and more than that, I know I love you, and I see who we are together—we laugh a lot, you are who I want to call when things are bad or good or interesting. So how can you being a shit mother really be something that carries any weight in terms of what it did to me, your child?—It didn’t. Which makes me think you weren’t, or at least, not entirely. She has fallen asleep, but she is smiling. I think even though it was a bit of a ramble, I made a good point. In making it, I realize I absolutely mean it.

4 Animism and the Alphabet Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw. –GARY SNYDER THE QUESTION REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF THE ecological crisis, or of modern civilization’s evident disregard for the needs of the natural world, has already provoked various responses from philosophers. There are those who suggest that a generally exploitative relation to the rest of nature is part and parcel of being human, and hence that the human species has from the start been at war with other organisms and the earth. Others, however, have come to recognize that long-established indigenous cultures often display a remarkable solidarity with the lands that they inhabit, as well as a basic respect, or even reverence, for the other species that inhabit those lands. Such cultures, much smaller in scale (and far less centralized) than modern Western civilization, seem to have maintained a relatively homeostatic or equilibrial relation with their local ecologies for vast periods of time, deriving their necessary sustenance from the land without seriously disrupting the ability of the earth to replenish itself. The fecundity and flourishing diversity of the North American continent led the earliest European explorers to

Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0. It didn’t work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper—the words I’d written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish. Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance—one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It’s easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened.

I immerse myself in sketching on my phone, tapping my stylus against the corner when I’m thinking through my design. I love the way there’s direction and guidance for something as wild and emotional as art, so some of my favorite books to read are on art theory. But the best learning comes from practice, after being guided by the lessons in the books.

They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants.

Fuit in Cartesio major librorum usus quam ipse videri volebat: hoc stylus et res ipsae docent.

all the reasons vinyl was better than CD or cassette tape. It wasn’t just 1) the ARTWORK and SLEEVE NOTES on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a HIDDEN TRACK, or a little MESSAGE carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the QUALITY OF SOUND. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, ‘Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?’) It wasn’t even 4) the RITUAL of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the JOURNEY. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to another, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to GET UP OFF YOUR ARSE and TAKE PART.

radio static and recurring drumming sounds. The being would wave his stylus about and this would generate more changes in my state of being. The colours in my room would shift and change, it was like

After reaching the food box the animal may turn and explore a blind alley, or retrace the entire maze (sometimes without a single error). His return to the food box is usually at a higher speed than the first part of the run, and he eats enthusiastically—on the second time of reaching food. Behavior is determined by the central phase sequence, and this means that the sequence is recurrent as well as anticipatory. Similarly, “mental backtracking” is reported by the blindfold human subject learning a stylus maze (Woodworth, 1938, p. 143).

Digital boards, also known as interactive or electronic whiteboards, have revolutionized the way information is presented and shared in various settings, ranging from classrooms to corporate boardrooms. These sophisticated devices combine the benefits of traditional whiteboards with cutting-edge technology, providing a dynamic and interactive platform for communication. Unlike static whiteboards, digital boards are equipped with touch-sensitive screens that respond to both stylus and finger input, allowing users to write, draw, and manipulate content with ease. This versatility enhances collaboration and engagement, making learning and business meetings more interactive and productive. The potential applications of digital boards are vast, from facilitating remote collaboration to enhancing creative brainstorming sessions. As technology continues to advance, we can expect further innovations in digital board design, with features such as artificial intelligence integration and enhanced interactivity. In essence, digital boards have become indispensable tools in modern communication, fostering dynamic and collaborative environments across educational, professional, and creative domains.

His smile didn’t waver but Hild heard the false note when he turned to Stephanus and said in Latin, “Note that many of these bricks are crumbling.” Stephanus obediently pressed his stylus to the wax. Hild saw that what he wrote was Of course the bricks are crumbling! and she snorted.

The stylus on those signature pads is wired to a computer that has just verified your identity by both your credit card swipe and your signature. It covertly uploads your prints direct from your hot little fingers into a database. Over time, Homeland Security builds a complete set from those partial reads.

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.” Silver—a metal people had used previously for jewelry and rituals—was desirable and scarce and easy to store and divide, and it became money-ish in Mesopotamia, but for lots of people—maybe most people—money still wasn’t a thing.

Aye, a man’d be a fool to lose his head twice over the same thing,” Thomas mused, still looking more than half stubborn. “Of course I’ll sign.” “He’d have to feel himself a little better than those around him to take up a challenge like that,” Foreman put in hurriedly as Thomas had already touched magnetic stylus to the form. “He’d have to be a man of some pride.” “I am a man of some pride,” Thomas said. “I do feel myself a little better than those around me, now that I really look at them.” “He’d have to be a man who couldn’t be pushed and couldn’t be scared,” said Foreman. “I say I’m such a man, even if it’s a lie. But I scare a little,” Thomas said. “He’d have to be a man who’d stand his ground even if he were scared,” Foreman needled. “He’d have to be quite a man to die for a point, even if he understood it only at the last minute, and then dimly. He’d have to be such a man-“ “Foreman, you fool, what are you up to?” Proctor demanded. “Who pushed me into the corner the other time, Fabian?” Thomas asked softly. “Who required my head of me for his point?” “If you’re granted another life, Thomas, you try to figure it out. Will he be writ as friend or enemy of you, do you think? On which side did he seem?

As Adam and Masa drove away from WeWork’s headquarters, Masa pulled out an iPad and began sketching the terms of a deal: SoftBank and the Vision Fund would invest more than $4 billion into WeWork. The investment would be the Vision Fund’s biggest to date, and many times larger than any funding round Adam had managed thus far. Masa signed his name, drew another line next to it, and handed Neumann the stylus. Adam had gotten WeWork this far in large part by making shrewd deals—acting coy when it suited him and playing hardball when necessary. But that morning, Adam had met with a spiritual adviser, as he often did before making big decisions, and received some advice: in life, it was sometimes necessary to do “the opposite of our nature.” Adam also knew a good deal when he saw one. After Masa dropped him off, Neumann got into his white Maybach, which had been trailing Masa’s car, turned up some rap music, and drove back to WeWork headquarters. A photo of the digital napkin, with Masa’s signature in red and Adam’s in blue, was soon circulating among WeWork executives. The entire exchange, from Masa’s twelve-minute tour to signatures sealing one of the largest venture capital investments of all time, had taken less than half an hour.

But I would miss her; I’d miss her a lot. Then I thought about the way each time a record album is played the grooves that hold the stylus get a tiny bit deeper. Grief is like that, etching its way deeper and deeper into my heart. But then, at the same time, grief is a talent, a skill, something I grow better at with each loss. It doesn’t seem like both ideas can be true, but I think they are. Even as the grief deepens, it becomes easier to carry.

Dear Father, dear Son, dear Spirit, The clock hands spin the dial at a maddening pace. The sun rises on the garden dial and the shadows of the stylus fall too spinning fast upon the Roman numerals that number my brief hours. My life is but a vapor that appears and then vanishes away. It is nothing more than the flight of a weaver's shuttle. It is the hurried trip of the sun gone fast across a shallow Attic sky. But never mind, I know two words that open heaven. And I shall speak the words amid the applause of gathering angels. And when I've said the words the gates will swing and the carpet to the throne will be as scarlet as forgiveness. And the words are kyrie elieson.

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