Nothing I have witnessed, from lava to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the … - Werner Herzog

People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

An elderly woman gathering wood, plump and impoverished, tells me about her children one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away — and this in a dialect that makes it hard for me to follow what she is saying. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer.

My heroes have a lot in common. Fabius Maximus, who is mocked to this day as a cunctator, or delayer, but who saved Rome from Hannibal's Carthaginian army; Hercules Seghers, a painter of the early Rembrandt era who was barely noticed but is considered the father of modernity and made paintings of a kind that would not be seen for several centuries. Or Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, who composed music fully three hundred years ahead of its time — I'm thinking here principally of his sixth book of madrigals — not until Stravinsky, who went on pilgrimages to Gesualdo's castle, did we hear such sounds again. Also included is Pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced an early form of monotheism half a millennium before Moses.