The servers hum like a cathedral made of cold breath. Rows of black monoliths exhale heat into a winter of fluorescent light, and somewhere in that machine midnight—so we’re told—there might be a version of you. Not your pulse, not your messy, mammalian chemistry, but a pattern: the way you turned a sentence, the laugh you couldn’t help, the heat map of your choices. It’s a seduction with chrome edges. … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
I have seen my life move like an arrow from one point to the next, its tail feathers fluttering like lost breath, a jet stream of spit. It’s hard to believe I was once a baby. Harder still to comprehend this mysterious, though inevitable, failure of the physical instruments of life that have propelled me this far. I rose, I arched, I flattened, I … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ In response to Artem’s essay called “Death by Banana Peel”, I decided – as is my custom – to hunt for a good quote to more or less sum up my own position. So I looked up “Famous quotes about Fear”. Surely, given that fear is an emotion universally felt and dealt with in countless ways, there would be a lot … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I remember working in a pub in Crawley, near Gatwick airport in London. Many years ago. I was by then probably in my early 30s. Yet, as they say, ‘everybody gets old, but you can stay immature forever.’ That would have been me back then.
I had lived in Bath during the 1970s, returned to the US to do a Master’s degree … Read the rest
