"An Elemental Thing" by Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger is one of the writers I reread whenever I need to escape the crescendoing mediocrity of content. To essay means to try, to attempt, but his essays are more like memory jars, a vessel encrusted with fragments collected by a magpie let loose in a library of shining words. This particular collection is beauty and strangeness and rest and unease and erudition and morality and curiosity and wonder and sad rhinoceroses. I like to read one of his pieces before bed and hope it shapes my dreams.