A. What we know from the physics of morphogenetic fields is that each family is beholden to one governing energy field. (A flier on a college campus in Oregon)

B. There was a palpable “soul climate.” (A testimonial on that flier)

C. Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation. (W.S. Gilbert, ”The Pirates of Penzance”)

D. Pitching stories on the American Dream is what writers do when their hearts are empty, their minds blank. (Zach Baron)

E. The primary visual cortex takes up more blood when imagining something than when actually seeing it (Skoyles & Sagan, quoted by Richard Powers)

I could fill a whole separate Twitter account with things I read on fliers during the five days I spent recently in Oregon. But this flier was my favorite. I love its confidence (“What we know”) and the way that it breezily redefines our understanding of one of the humanity’s most inscrutable social formations: the family unit. Or as Tolstoy would have put it in “Anna Karenina,” if he’d had the benefit of taking this seminar: “Morphogenetically balanced families are all alike in their governing energy fields; morphogenetically unbalanced families, however, have governing energy fields that radiate on decidedly unique wavelengths.”



Our finalists, however, are C and E: the delightful Victorian wit of W.S. Gilbert versus a counterintuitive neurological factoid. (The latter comes from an essay in which Richard Powers whips himself into an ecstatic froth about mirror neurons and the work of Haruki Murakami.) And the winner is … E: “The primary visual cortex takes up more blood when imagining something than when actually seeing it.” That’s fascinating: that the brain spends more of its energy on fantasy, or empathy, than it does on reality. Congratulations: the prize is more sentences, right away.

WEEK TWO:

F. There’s a long American tradition of mixing economic populism with cephalopods. (Dave Gilson, Mother Jones)

G. I’m not a great journalist, and I can’t interview anybody, but what I can do is kind of, I will slice open my head for you. (David Foster Wallace )

H. As soon as you stepped out onto the street, the heat sat on your chest like a Mannerist gargoyle. (Elif Batuman in Florence, Harper’s)

I. … and Vivien calling her husband, of all things, “Wonkypenky.” (William Logan on baby talk in the T.S. Eliot household)

J. Kennedy himself is represented as godlike, with occasional endearing peccadilloes like the fact that he changed into his pajamas to take naps. (Paula Marantz Cohen on Jacqueline Kennedy)

K. Once upon a time there were people who weren’t very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today. (E.H. Gombrich, “A Little History of the World”)

Our finalists here are H and K. The former comes from a characteristically charming Elif Batuman essay about participating in a citywide reading of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in Florence. The latter is from the art historian E.H. Gombrich’s hypnotic “A Little History of the World” — a history of the entire world, written over six weeks when Gombrich was in his mid-20s, intended for intelligent and curious children. It is written, fittingly, in a tone of innocent wonder. (“If you want to know exactly where Egypt is, I suggest you ask a swallow.”) The sentence above, K, is Gombrich’s hilariously simplistic explanation of the shape of a prehistoric skull (shallow forehead, big jaw): “once upon a time there were people who weren’t very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today.” And that’s our winner for week two of October. The prize is a temporary cessation of sentences.