https://silasjelley.com/feeds/everything/ /icon/48.ico Silas Jelley reply@silasjelley.com 2026-06-05T16:04:30Z tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:027f9380-98d7-4b0a-bf17-ae633d3ea852 2026-06-05T16:13:21Z 2026-06-05T16:14:30Z <p>I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through instalments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents</p>4:13pm on June 5, 2026 from Tinchlik, Fergana, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, Ch. 6, The Roof Over Every Head, 2000, Harper Collins”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b10528e1-96cf-4885-a9a5-7f791ae62c43 2026-06-03T11:03:51Z 2026-06-03T11:04:51Z <p>The sufferings of the present were aggravated by the dread of the future.</p>11:03am on June 3, 2026 from Navgarzan, Fergana, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, 1992”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ac90f7eb-4dd4-4670-8724-ca2974b3916a 2026-06-02T15:33:19Z 2026-06-02T15:33:33Z <p>When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.</p>3:33pm on June 2, 2026 from Angren, Tashkent Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Kikuyu people of central Kenya, Swahili proverb”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:7ae7c997-4c10-4e7d-9358-e3b6d766fb88 2026-05-28T23:36:05Z 2026-05-28T23:36:38Z <p>Back home, I just can’t be myself.</p>11:36pm on May 28, 2026 from Tashkent, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Bin from Singapore, met in Tashkent”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b0a03c4f-8356-4813-8ff9-ec238811acc0 2026-05-21T20:20:21Z 2026-05-21T20:20:37Z <p>Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.</p>8:20pm on May 21, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995, Random House”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:e817cdca-8fd0-4351-b30e-9bfeca7bbef6 2026-05-21T15:35:16Z 2026-05-21T15:35:56Z <p>To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.</p>3:35pm on May 21, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, Ch. 3, The Tool, 1939, Harcourt Brace (1992 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:eb31abee-b66d-46f2-b116-a63da228a586 2026-05-21T00:06:03Z 2026-05-21T00:06:30Z <p>The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.</p>12:06am on May 21, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Jack London in E. J. Hopkins's, Jack London's Philosophy, San Francisco Bulletin, 1916”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:21a11c5c-06f4-4cea-af00-1fc3c83a08de 2026-05-20T13:21:04Z 2026-05-20T13:21:04Z <p>What can we make of any of this? It is the surreal and unique condition of our age. But these facts hold the same intensity and mystery as any lonely peak. The world is as rich as it ever was. Any belief less is cowardice and self consolation - Gerard Manley Hopkins <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur">opened and closed that question</a> 150 years ago. Whenever we feel most keenly that “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”, a second, greater voice replies: “And for all this, nature is never spent”.</p> <p>Distance has been destroyed. The world lurches forward in phantasmagoric collage. We can run from this fact, seeking ever deeper tracts of jungle to relive the idyll of the Victorian explorer - window shopping online for the last “vision quests” on the market - or we can accept the eternal and unvarying charge of the traveler: to remake the world as we experience it - and to be drowned, laughing, in the new.</p>1:21pm on May 20, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henry Weikel, Like shining from shook foil, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0909487b-be72-4221-a3a8-7fad103a001a 2026-05-20T13:14:20Z 2026-05-20T13:14:20Z <p>To be saturated in any aspect of the world is noble.</p>1:14pm on May 20, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henry Weikel, Like shining from shook foil, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:1d81664e-0426-4a91-a62d-ce25e8351aef 2026-05-20T13:09:30Z 2026-05-20T13:09:30Z <p>When he began to travel as a student he first went to Iceland and Norway - distant northern lands, places with icy and volcanic landscapes - but he felt isolated by language, and they did not answer precisely his imagination of northness. In contrast, Scotland offered the first real places to correspond to his inner world. Minutes after his arrival in 1979 on the Hamburg to Newcastle ferry, he saw his first British road sign reading simply ‘The North’. This generalization, as opposed to the precise reckoning of kilometers on Continental signs, struck him as transformational, poetic.</p>1:09pm on May 20, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Peter Davidson, The Idea of North, 2004, Reaktion Books”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:c806596e-7a94-4dbc-b820-aa6ecca26c44 2026-05-20T12:10:28Z 2026-05-20T12:10:28Z <p>Enough! Have some dignity and leave that stone unturned. Suck down whatever’s at hand and quick, back to your oars! There will be time enough for Yelp reviews in the grave. Fly wherever’s cheapest and learn to throw knives in the first bar you find. Take a ferry to an island off the coast and miss the day’s last return. You’ll meet a woman there with clairvoyant eyes who will press a warm stone into your palm. Your leisure should be ferocious. It should take more from you than you thought you had to give, but too many face their vacation like a period of mourning.</p>12:10pm on May 20, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henry Weikel, Like shining from shook foil, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6c860cad-e1e4-4255-84a9-186555720887 2026-05-19T18:40:59Z 2026-05-19T18:40:59Z <blockquote><p><p>I understood then that if I were to relive those scenes in the Conciergerie and Beaulieu as intensely as I had felt them when they occurred, I would have to be alone, completely alone. It was a relief to know this, and I realized that the communal life that lay in store would produce new needs, new responses, new projects.</p></p> <cite>— <a href="/2026/05/08/201404">Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)</a></cite></blockquote> <p>A reminder that isolation fosters and enlarges resentment, and that only living communally can drive it out.</p> 6:40pm on May 19, 2026<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“May 19, 2026 6.40PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:39b4cbe0-c5d2-40f8-acc9-9b10f65f0c7f 2026-05-19T14:38:57Z 2026-05-19T14:38:57Z <p>It would be impossible to guess at a man’s way of living his life without being locked in it with him.</p>2:38pm on May 19, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, Ch. Prisoner of the Sand, 1939, Ukemi (2016 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0d51d2bb-e66a-4cb0-b422-16bff9af4012 2026-05-18T19:36:13Z 2026-05-18T19:36:13Z <p>You don’t make over a life the way you sew on a button.</p>7:36pm on May 18, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:62e59c99-f60f-481d-b38e-4ac830ecf8d4 2026-05-18T19:35:37Z 2026-05-18T19:35:37Z <p>We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals.</p>7:35pm on May 18, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:11b327eb-4405-4c11-9aca-7ed2b52f5adc 2026-05-18T19:21:01Z 2026-05-18T19:21:01Z <p>I must rehabilitate myself in my own eyes first, then in the eyes of others.</p>7:21pm on May 18, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ef982097-602e-4b18-9c7e-df70d57051d7 2026-05-18T12:48:41Z 2026-05-18T12:48:41Z <p>If you’re too hot, take your socks off.<br/>If you’re too cold, put your socks on.<br/>If you don’t have socks, find socks.</p> <p>Often we overcomplicate life.</p> 12:48pm on May 18, 2026<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“May 18, 2026 12.48PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b4dd345e-0ab3-4a8d-82dd-1ab42e492ae8 2026-05-18T12:47:15Z 2026-05-18T12:47:15Z <p>On working days, that’s how I feel when I have to call, say, my bank. Too much movement. <em>Entirely</em> too much movement. Calling the bank. Listening to the dial pad options. Going through all the details with the bank person. Too much movement.</p> <p>It’s a kind of death for the creative part of the mind. The ability to enter into Bookworld is murdered by saying your account number out loud. I don’t know why that’s so, it just is. Maybe it has something to do with the confined particularities of accounts, of banking, of paying bills, for example. How these systems are now more and more complex. Intricate in ways that bring no pleasure or satisfaction of completion. Are never complete. Convenient, yes, in some ways but all necessitating that you: pick up the Mediation Device in order to engage.</p> <p>Touching the device is too much movement. The device is tricky like that. It looks inert, the black mirror. There on the counter. Very demure. It’s a Stone of Terrenon made modern. It will teach you the name of the shadow that haunts you while binding you twice over. To make the call you must touch the stone. To move your hand to the stone is not a few feet, it’s a few lifetimes. You touch the stone and lose a life, lose a path. You are rewired. It’s so much more movement than you could ever imagine.</p>12:47pm on May 18, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Craig Mod, Phone Calls vs. Creative Work, Zero Milestone, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:fd308c39-f83b-45bd-b632-7883eb3d6156 2026-05-17T23:05:14Z 2026-05-17T23:05:14Z <p>So don’t be a tourist or a disappointed explorer; be something else. Have a reason for each place you go - or better still, have no reason at all. But be sure to avoid that unhallowed middle ground: the week off work with a list of someone else’s recommendations, the expedition that attempts to claim someone else’s heroism. Unlike the early 20th century, the present day reserves fewer spaces for the intrepid alone. Institutional backing and a high tolerance for discomfort no longer guarantee a serene or transformative experience. Today’s travel requires different sensitivities.</p>11:05pm on May 17, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henry Weikel, Like shining from shook foil, Shore Leave, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bf010723-6969-4232-8e29-47a390416cb8 2026-05-17T14:14:13Z 2026-05-17T14:14:13Z <p>I’ve met many abroad who are addicted to this form of freedom; I stayed adrift for many years partly to cling to it myself. But for its brief compensations, it’s almost always a trap, a poor substitute for simply enjoying the desert and then passing-by.</p>2:14pm on May 17, 2026 from Shymkent, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henry Weikel, Summer in the Kingdom II, Shore Leave, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:4af9aaa8-640c-4f4f-817b-bfb3ebd8a90d 2026-05-17T14:01:28Z 2026-05-25T22:00:24Z <figure class="gallery"><picture> <source srcset="/images/2026/04/18/193615-826E-1.avif" type="image/avif"/> <img alt="Mushke (my hand cart) rests beside a crumbling dwelling in the desert of the Ustyurt Plateau, Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan" height="1067" src="/images/2026/04/18/193615-826E-1.jpg" width="1600"/></picture> <figcaption>Mushke (my hand cart) rests beside a crumbling dwelling in the desert of the Ustyurt Plateau, Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan</figcaption> </figure> <p>There is an infinity to the desert that I don’t find anywhere else. Even at sea, out of sight of land, the waves and currents which must after all be going somewhere admit that beyond the horizon there is land, terra firma, people, civilisation, and therefore activity beyond the push of the gulf stream and the pull of the moon. But the desert, more often than not, makes no such admission.</p> <p>I first fell in love with the desert while cycling around Australia, through such imaginitively named tracts as the <em>Great Sandy Desert</em> but also the <em>Kimberleys</em>, <em>Pilbara</em>, <em>Salinaland</em>, and the <em>Nullarbor Plain</em>. My love of deserts shares a little with my love of mountains, expressed most fully in <a href="/bo" title="Bo and the mountain | November 2024">Bo and the mountain</a> but while a desert may be monumental, the deserts I have known contain few monuments. If the mountain is mother nature in exultation, and to climb a mountain is to feel lifted beyond oneself, the desert is almost the opposite, akin to being pressed into oneself.</p> <blockquote><p><p>All is stillness and desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been, and how many more it will thus remain. Yet in this scene without one bright object there is high pleasure which I can neither explain or comprehend.</p></p> <cite>— <a href="/2026/03/23/173247">Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, Ch. VIII: Banda Oriental and Patagonia, 1839</a></cite></blockquote> <p>A desert <em>is</em> a desolate place, almost barren of features and people, and the <em>Kazakh Steppe</em>, <em>Ustyurt Plateau</em>, and <em>Kyzylkum Desert</em> that have dominated the walk so far this year have been no exception, a naked landscape stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions with no promise but more of the same. For two-thousand kilometres the horizon has lain flat, “the lone and level sands stretching far away”<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref">¹</a>, unchanging. Without the intrusion of so much as a hill the days lose definition until the whole experience melts into one continuous march atop a treadmill of infinite sand under a vast blue sky. In a still desert even the ground seems to fall away and the sensation, heightened by the uber fatigue of too much walking and too little sleep, is of endlessly falling fowards.</p> <p>But the desert is not always still. If I have been aware of anything in these two months it has been the wind. Hot winds from the East, cold winds from the West and North, steady winds, gusting winds, winds that sworl and squall, winds that lift and others that seem to press you down to the earth more than gravity itself. Even an absence of wind begins to feel like yet another of its many voices. For two days a wretched headwind bent me double and pushed me one step back for every five forward in an exhausting tug of war. In the city of Kungrad, at the end of a 400km stretch across Qaraqalpaqstan without more than the slightest of settlements to interrupt the expanse, my host would tell me that those same winds had wrenched roofs from houses and flattened power poles, leaving large parts of the city without power for days.</p> <p>When the wind blows, that once still sand takes flight, and all of a sudden the eyelashes, dormant and ornamental for much of our lives, become active and essential again. The airborne sand, seemingly immune to the weak protests of zippers, seals, and roll-top bags works its way into everything: into shoes, into pockets, into the ears and into every pore of exposed skin; it finds its way into the threads beneath the caps of water bottles, builds up beneath my watch strap, and collects between the wadded notes of Kazakh Tenge and Uzbeki Som in my wallet. My skin, already scorched by the unrelenting sun and dried by the many voices of the wind, is abraded by this assault of sand until my hands begin to resemble the coarse and cracked surface of the desert itself.</p> <figure class="gallery"><picture> <source srcset="/images/2026/04/05/233631.949E-1.avif" type="image/avif"/> <img alt="My tent pitched on the cracked surface of the desert. Mushke, my cart, beside it. Western Kazakhstan." height="1203" src="/images/2026/04/05/233631.949E-1.jpg" width="1600"/></picture> <figcaption>My tent pitched on the cracked surface of the desert amidst a low scrub of desert Shuvoq (Wormwood).</figcaption> </figure> <p>I walk for hours after the sun has set, often until two or three in the morning, and while I steal a little sleep on the sand, all around me the wind and the sand are at work. I sleep deliriously, half-aware of the whip-like lashing of the wind that seems intent on flattening my tent, and of the almost continuous vibrations of the single forked aluminium pole that forms the skeleton of it. With each gust the tent seems to bow lower, as if trying to get beneath the wind itself, either in submission or stoic rebellion, until the fabric of the fly is pressed against my face like a ghostly hand come to suffocate me. At last the dawn, “the appearance of that pale bouquet, of that beacon that rises to the east of the black lands”<a href="#fn2" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref">²</a>, lighting my tent enough to reveal the drifts of dust-like sand that have worked their way under the rainfly, over the bathtub floor, and through the mesh of the inner, so that by morning the floor of the tent seems already halfway to being subsumed by the desert floor beneath it. Like this, even within the span of a few hours, the steady work of the desert is revealed, the erosion and reclamation of all that trespass through it, and the erosion and reclamation of me too.</p> <figure class="gallery"><picture> <source srcset="/images/2026/04/10/130857-693E-1.avif" type="image/avif"/> <img alt="The ribcage of a dead horse protrudes from the wind blown sand, close to the Uzbek border, Western Kazakhstan." height="1067" src="/images/2026/04/10/130857-693E-1.jpg" width="1600"/></picture> <figcaption>The desert spares nothing, eventually all is returned to dust.</figcaption> </figure> <section role="doc-endnotes"><hr/> <ol> <li id="fn1"><p>“The lone and level sands…”, a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias">“Ozymandias”</a><a href="#fnref1" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> <li id="fn2"><p>“that pale bouquet…”, from Bill Homewood’s translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s <em>Terre des Hommes</em><a href="#fnref2" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> </ol> </section> 2:01pm on May 17, 2026<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“A pale bouquet over the sand”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b602ee75-0a5a-4316-8304-97372bf94465 2026-05-16T20:58:41Z 2026-05-16T20:58:41Z <p>Those who trust others are trustworthy themselves.</p>8:58pm on May 16, 2026 from Saryaghash, Turkistan, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:e6d0222d-671d-480a-ade7-493852347194 2026-05-11T09:03:36Z 2026-05-11T09:03:36Z <p>One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a trap. You need to reinvent a couple of wheels to get to the edge of what we know about wheel-making, not a thousand wheels, and not zero; probably four or five is sufficient in most domains, maybe closer to twenty or thirty in the most epistemically rigorous and developed fields like mathematics or computer science. Each wheel you reinvent, and every directed question you ask along the way, will propel you faster to the true frontier than that same amount of time spent in idle study, or even five times that amount.</p>9:03am on May 11, 2026 from Jizzakh Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Andrew Quinn, Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6cc4b669-0a72-4b3a-8c31-84743e373d25 2026-05-09T17:05:28Z 2026-05-09T17:05:28Z <p>Instead of buying your children all the things you never had, you should teach them all the things you were never taught. Material wears out but knowledge stays.</p>5:05pm on May 9, 2026 from Samarqand, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“unknown”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6f690ead-fc03-46eb-808d-12a920d96fa5 2026-05-09T16:20:35Z 2026-05-09T16:20:35Z <p>In the kaleidoscope that passed before my eyes, I saw disconnected pictures and felt a confusion of sensations that were extraordinarily precise in outline.</p>4:20pm on May 9, 2026 from Samarqand Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:830a1327-5fa1-4548-84e7-30c0a2fa3cbe 2026-05-08T20:15:10Z 2026-05-08T20:15:10Z <p>I understood then that if I were to relive those scenes in the Conciergerie and Beaulieu as intensely as I had felt them when they occurred, I would have to be alone, completely alone. It was a relief to know this, and I realized that the communal life that lay in store would produce new needs, new responses, new projects.</p>8:15pm on May 8, 2026 from Samarqand Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:7180f705-55ce-428f-91a7-1f6d2767c4f7 2026-05-08T19:51:18Z 2026-05-08T19:51:18Z <p>It was a knockout blow—a punch so overwhelming that I didn’t get back on my feet for fourteen years. And to deliver a blow like that, they went to a lot of trouble.</p>7:51pm on May 8, 2026 from Samarqand Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:7f69d527-371c-424f-9a58-ee2bcfe106b2 2026-05-08T19:50:44Z 2026-05-08T19:50:44Z <p>No nation has the right to revenge itself or rush to eliminate people just because they cause society anxiety. They should be healed instead of given such inhuman punishment.</p>7:50pm on May 8, 2026 from Samarqand Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:4a42743c-5a7f-481a-b6c4-81ecf6d7025d 2026-05-05T14:34:15Z 2026-05-05T14:34:15Z <p>Being in an awkward situation is actually not that bad. It sucks in the moment, but then you just take a few minutes to calm down and then you move on with your life. You’re ok.</p>2:34pm on May 5, 2026 from Navoiy Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Thienan Tran, Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0017dac0-81ee-4b73-b3fa-185ab31bca30 2026-05-03T11:42:35Z 2026-05-03T11:42:35Z <p>Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.</p>11:42am on May 3, 2026 from Bukhara Region, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 1847”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:5f8e6ead-a09f-4f68-8722-484c489bceb9 2026-05-03T11:40:56Z 2026-05-03T11:40:56Z <p>Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.</p>11:40am on May 3, 2026 from Yangibozor Qishlog'i, Bukhara, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:edfa27f6-7650-4a3f-8f0f-ddcdf8f92c63 2026-05-02T11:52:40Z 2026-05-02T11:52:40Z <p>You can travel the whole world, but there are always new things to learn.</p>11:52am on May 2, 2026 from Bukhara, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Biff in Christopher Moore's, Lamb, 2002, William Morrow”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:274ae141-0992-449f-9d30-fe08ee9264dc 2026-05-01T22:32:13Z 2026-05-01T22:32:13Z <p>Routine feeds the illusion of safety.</p>10:32pm on May 1, 2026 from Bukhara, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Biff in Christopher Moore's, Lamb, 2002, William Morrow”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bb4ce02d-35c2-44ef-a510-0bd7a2e48c7b 2026-05-01T21:23:11Z 2026-05-01T21:23:11Z <p>All fear comes from trying to see the future.</p>9:23pm on May 1, 2026 from Bukhara, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Joshua in Christopher Moore's, Lamb, 2002, William Morrow”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:1a774403-656d-43a1-aea8-89f514e4b5f7 2026-05-01T21:15:04Z 2026-05-01T21:15:04Z <p>Any freedom that can be given, can be taken away.</p>9:15pm on May 1, 2026 from Bukhara, Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Joshua in Christopher Moore's, Lamb, 2002, William Morrow”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:f2763078-95e7-479f-b54c-24fc1e5457d6 2026-04-29T16:09:25Z 2026-04-29T16:09:25Z <figure class="gallery"><picture> <source srcset="/images/2026/04/29/145622-129E-2.avif" type="image/avif"/> <img alt="Umit, who inexplicably lived alone in the middle of nowhere with no car, but very kindly invited me in for chai and to cool off in the unrelenting heat of another desert day. Uzbekistan." height="2399" src="/images/2026/04/29/145622-129E-2.jpg" width="1600"/></picture> </figure> <p>In a building I really thought was abandoned I found a man, Umit, living in rooms blackened with soot. He clearly makes an effort to keep the place clean and tidy, but nothing can wholly outdo the work of a wood fire that vents indoors. The Chorny tea is thin, almost just hot water, but welcome refreshment all the same. He has power but by the length of time it takes to boil the kettle (more than 10 minutes) I suspect it is only 12 volt, not grid. Perhaps he has a few solar panels out the back. On the stove he is cooking something in a large aluminium pot which he periodically gets up to stir. Another massive pot beside it is used for purifying water.</p> <p>He only has four toes on his right foot, and it doesn’t look like he’s lost one. He is alone here, a long way from anywhere and with no car, and no apparent work. By his manner a part of me wonders if he is simple, if someone drops him supplies from time to time and he just lives out here with the sand and the flies, so many flies, and then I scald myself for letting my imagination make such leaps. I am also alone, a long way from anywhere and with no car, and no apparent work. Am I simple? And would that be so bad?</p> <p>The heat is destroying me today. I know that every minute I rest here is another minute I must walk beyond midnight tonight, but the relief of sweating merely profusely lying here in the shade atop this hard wooden bench as opposed to sweating sheer buckets out there under the white fury of a desert sun is too much for me to give up.</p> <p>We eat small pomegranates which Umit quarters with a knife that has been sellotaped back together and looks like a shiv that would turn up in a cell search after a prison stabbing. I am too exhausted to say more than a few words, and Umit seems happy to talk for both of us. My brain of mush grasps enough to understand as he explains that the pomegranates are small here because there is so little water out here. Half the pods inside don’t reach sweetness, so you quickly learn to eat around those parts. He says in Samarkand there is more water and the pomegranates grow large, using his head to indicate (and perhaps exaggerate) their size. Perhaps I too will find water in Samarkand. I day dream of rain, but I know I could be without it for months yet, and when the rains do settle in in earnest towards years end I will yearn again for even this solid air and searing heat.</p> <p>The rice that has been cooking on the stove is ready. It has fruit cooked in with it yet somehow doesn’t taste of much, that or my tastebuds have suspended their work in protest of the heat, but even still it is divine. Soft, sticky, fat slicked rice. Mimicking Umit and others I have been invited to eat with in the desert, I scrape a small mound to the edge of the plate we share, press it with spoon upturned and it comes up as a perfectly formed mouthful heaped and clinging to the spoon, and then seems to melt on the tongue.</p> <p>Umit encourages me to sleep and I do for a while. Later, rising from one desert fever dream and stepping out into another, slightly cooler one, thanking Umit profusely, I wander on in the direction of Bukhara, several days ahead.</p> 4:09pm on April 29, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Umit, chai, soot, and flies”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:20132a94-c63b-4099-8174-5936c7328b85 2026-04-28T01:26:34Z 2026-04-28T01:26:34Z <p>The writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? And, Can I do it?</p>1:26am on April 28, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 1989, Harper & Row”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0065d64a-0318-492d-b1f9-23f41e9cac95 2026-04-27T17:09:55Z 2026-04-27T17:09:55Z <p>When we accept our role, even the most modest of roles, only then will we be happy, only then can you live in peace, and die in peace. Because what gives meaning to life, gives meaning to death.</p>5:09pm on April 27, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, Ch. Barcelona and Madrid, 1939, Ukemi (2016 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:c68336ba-e786-485d-be44-4197839db24b 2026-04-27T16:43:12Z 2026-04-27T16:43:12Z <p>You can classify men as men from the right and men from the left, hunchbacks and non-hunchbacks, fascists and democrats. And these distinctions are unassailable, but the truth you know, is that which simplifies the world and not that which creates chaos. The truth is the language that identifies the world. […] The truth is not that which explains, it is that which simplifies.</p>4:43pm on April 27, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, Ch. Barcelona and Madrid, 1939, Ukemi (2016 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:a87c1a41-9bd9-427f-8d16-8ce54f4cff13 2026-04-27T16:43:12Z 2026-04-27T16:43:12Z <p>Nothing is easier than to divide men into rightists and leftists, hunchbacks and straightbacks, fascists and democrats—and these distinctions will be perfectly just. But truth, we know, is that which clarifies, not that which confuses. Truth is the language which expresses universality.</p>4:43pm on April 27, 2026 from Uzbekistan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, Ch. Barcelona and Madrid, 1939, Harcourt Brace (1992 edition)”">Reply via email</a></p>