Personalia about RJO

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Things that please me — Books · Genealogy · Typography · Poetry · Ancient history · Landscape architecture · Photography · Museums · Natural history · Maps · Barber’s Agnus Dei · Cemeteries · Heraldry · Good markup · Wit · Stamps · Astronomy · Lenore.

Things that do not please me — Morning · Bright lights · Noise pollution · Inelegance · Toadies, liars, and parasites · Streets with no sidewalks · Sidewalks with no grass between the pedestrians and the traffic · Traffic · Headaches · Global warming.

How I think — INTJ.

Things I wish I had — A G4 PowerBook · A house overlooking the North Atlantic · A wife · A lifetime supply of Pepperidge Farm cookies · An independent fortune.

Things I wish I understood — Quantum mechanics · Probability theory · Space-time.

Places I have been — Emily Dickinson’s bedroom · The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences · The vault of the Houghton Library · The Otago Peninsula · The Weddell Sea.

Places I have not been — Hadrian’s Wall · The Aran Islands · Fort Ticonderoga · L’Anse aux Meadows · Miletus · The other Cambridge · Oxford.

Schools I attended — Moses Brown School · The University of Massachusetts at Amherst · Harvard University.

Random books that are great for one reason or another — The Outermost House (“They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”) · Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (“Their breath is agitation, and their life / A storm whereon they ride.”) · The Life of Emily Dickinson (“I read a few words since I came home – John Talbot’s parting with his son, and Margaret’s with Suffolk. I read them in the garret, and the rafters wept.”) · Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (“The shortage that the combat soldier finds most offensive, however, is shortage of competence.”) · The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633 · The Founding of Harvard College (“A narrow gorge through which a stream of learning, the Arts and Sciences, Philosophies, and Humane Letters, poured from the Old World into New England.”) · Jubilate Agno (“For the names and numbers of animals are as the names and numbers of the stars.”) · The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (“Self-serving spinelessness, not ideology, is what led to the current catastrophe in our universities.”) · Paul Revere’s Ride (“The fight had been the hinge—so one saw it—on which the large revolving future was to turn.”) · Magnalia Christi Americana · The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (“No Rose, yet felt myself a’bloom, / No Bird – yet rode in Ether”) · Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (“A scholar in search of truth, he found himself among placemen in search of a place.”) · Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (“Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments.”).