The Named Peace on The Approximate Mind

Pax Mnemonica

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the record every order runs on, and what changes when the record answers back
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Ashurbanipal ruled Assyria from 669 until around 631 and was, unusually for a king in that part of the world at that time, literate. He said so himself and appears to have been telling the truth. He could read Akkadian and some Sumerian, including scripts already archaic when he learned them, and he was proud of it in a way that comes through the inscriptions across twenty-six centuries.

Pax Artifica

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the peace that is not a made thing but a maker, and on the first of the things it made
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Pliny the Elder commanded the fleet at Misenum, on the northern lip of the bay, which was the finest posting in the western Mediterranean and left him with enough time to write the longest book anyone in the ancient world had attempted. He worked at it obsessively. His nephew records that he had a secretary read aloud to him during meals, took notes in the bath, and considered any hour not spent reading to be a theft from the total. Thirty-seven books. Everything known about the earth, the sky, the animals, the metals, the properties of plants, the customs of peoples his readers would never meet.

Pax Oblivionis

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the peace nobody is keeping, and why there is no way to complain about it
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Around the year 100, at a fort called Vindolanda on the northern edge of the Roman province of Britain, a woman named Claudia Severa dictated a short letter to a friend. Her husband commanded a garrison somewhere nearby. Her friend, Sulpicia Lepidina, was married to the prefect at Vindolanda. The letter is an invitation. Severa’s birthday falls on the eleventh of September and she would like Lepidina to come, and says the day will be better if she does.

Pax Grammatica

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the layer of a peace that outlives the power holding it, and what this one’s is made of
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The Western Roman Empire ended in 476, or in 480, or gradually and at no particular moment, depending on which historian is arguing. Whichever date you take, Cassiodorus was born after it. He grew up in Calabria in a family that had served the Roman state for four generations, entered public life in his twenties, and spent thirty years drafting the official correspondence of a kingdom in Italy ruled by a Gothic king named Theodoric.

Pax Interlingua

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the peace of perfect translation, and the room the conversation moves to
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Leibniz spent something like fifty years on a language nobody was going to speak.

The Harvested Half

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the two things one filter does, and how they land on the same person at once
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Ruth is writing up a case. It is a Thursday evening, the clinic is closed, and she has been asked to contribute a short piece to a nephrology newsletter that maybe nine hundred people read. The subject is the thing she has been doing for thirteen years with the older, thin, diabetic patients whose numbers do not behave the way the schedule says they should.

The Named Peace on The Approximate Mind

Pax Mnemonica

On the record every order runs on, and what changes when the record answers back #

Pax Artifica

On the peace that is not a made thing but a maker, and on the first of the things it made #

Pax Oblivionis

On the peace nobody is keeping, and why there is no way to complain about it #

Pax Grammatica

On the layer of a peace that outlives the power holding it, and what this one’s is made of #

Pax Interlingua

On the peace of perfect translation, and the room the conversation moves to #

The Harvested Half

On the two things one filter does, and how they land on the same person at once #

On the record every order runs on, and what changes when the record answers back
#

On the peace that is not a made thing but a maker, and on the first of the things it made
#

On the peace nobody is keeping, and why there is no way to complain about it
#

On the layer of a peace that outlives the power holding it, and what this one’s is made of
#

On the peace of perfect translation, and the room the conversation moves to
#

On the two things one filter does, and how they land on the same person at once
#