In the early morning you awoke to the sound of a large plane flying above. Perhaps too close for comfort. Things are often thrown into sharp distinction in the silent hours. You pictured the sound of it passing over you as if it were a wave. And the birds were startled out of their slumber as well as they started to chirp wildly and this huge shadowed bird flying up above them.
First one or two, then more and more until it peaked with the wave. All this seemed to be happening in slow motion. As the plane moved out of range the chirping also died down and came to a rest. You imagined a perfect bell curve with the chirping distributed in a smooth pattern.
In the morning you found a dead crow on the ground beneath one of the trees. What had happened to her?
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L. Daston writes in the Chronicle about great books (not Great Books) that we once read but have supposedly been surpassed by more narrowly focused disciplinary works. The kind of wide-ranging books with huge imaginative sweep written between 1920 and 1980, say. Not popular or general books but not specialized texts either. Instead, what one might call scholarly works (is there a distinction between intellectuals and academics now?)
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