Socrates: Let us begin, then, with a picture of our citizens’ manner of life, with the provision we have made for them. They will be producing corn and wine, and making clothes and shoes. When they have built their houses, they will mostly work without their coats or shoes in summer, and in winter will be well shod and clothed. For their food, they will prepare flour and barley-meal for kneading and baking, and set out a grand spread of loaves and cakes on rushes or fresh leaves. Then they will lie on beds of myrtle-boughs and bryony and make merry with their children, drinking their wine after the feast with garlands on their heads and singing the praises of the gods. So they will live pleasantly together; and a prudent fear of poverty or war will keep them from begetting children beyond their means.

Glaucon: You seem to expect your citizens to feast on dry bread.

Socrates: True, I said; I forgot that they will have something to give it a relish, salt, no doubt, and olives, and cheese, and country stews of roots and vegetables. And for desert we will give them figs and peas and beans; and they shall roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, while they sip their wine. Leading such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in the same manner.

The Republic

By the time our “scherm” was finished the moon was coming up, and our dinner of giraffe steaks and roasted marrow-bones was ready. How we enjoyed those marrow-bones, though it was rather a job to crack them! I know no greater luxury than giraffe marrow, unless it is elephant’s heart, and we had that on the morrow.

King Solomon’s Mines
Dedication, King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard

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Blood On The Wall – “Stoner Jam”
Awesomer

I place this song under the same “nearly perfect” category as the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine,” Radiohead’s “Airbag,” and Skygreen Leopards’ “The Heron.” There are hundreds of such songs in my memory, but it is still relatively exclusive company; it is a category of consummate craftsmanship and a sort of syzygy of every element in a song to make it something more than a sequence of notes. Blood On The Wall’s “Lightning Song” is another good example. (insound)

The floor of the cloister itself was covered with thousands of identical, horn-shaped, nine-sided tiles that had been joined together with machine-tool precision into a nonrepeating double-spiral pattern that was giving me motion sickness just looking at it. I turned my back on this and looked at a loaf of bread that was resting on the table. This was so fresh that steam was gushing out of the end — Arsibalt, an infamous heel-filcher, had already got to it. The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a nontrivial pattern that, I feared, had deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgian Saunt.

Anathem

Collections of Colonies of Bees – “Flocks III”
Birds

This track belongs with the grand-daddies of post-rock: GY!BE’s “Storm,” Tarentel’s “Ursa Minor, Ursa Major,” much of Mono’s Walking Cloud, and so on. Their take on the long-form instrumental rock genre is more repetitive and anthemic than Mono’s wandering strains of hard-soft or Godspeed’s tone poems. Warning: the track is 11 minutes long, and you have to listen to the whole thing straight and at great volume. (insound)