Little Discoveries

I've been a fan of Dan Simmons' writing for a long time, but it never occurred to me to go look for a website, or blog, or whatever. I happened to follow a link, though, off of Colleen Doran's blog, to that of Simmons', and I'm glad I did.

His message for September is about houses, the homes of writers, and of architecture in general. And one part toward the end really caught me:

The World’s Fair Futurama of 1939 is a brilliant view of a brilliant future – all 30-lane highways and 100-story apartment buildings – that will never arrive. Our monkey brains . . . which, to be honest, are the only brains we have worth using . . . reject that.

We love textures and human scale and color and sheltering places. We may disdain clutter, but we love our things and want to see them. We delight in sudden vistas and open views even while we like to be inside and warm with our family when it rains and snows outside. As much as we like our big views in the daylight, we don’t always want darkness pressing against glass panes trying to get in at night. Our deep brains tell us that there are things out there in the night that will eat us given half a chance. We are peaceful tree dwellers and murderous savannah runner-hunters who became cave dwellers out of necessity and we haven’t worked out all the hardwired paradoxes of that yet.

The full post can be found here.