We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

I might be in a wheelchair, but I still want to be treated as a lady.

A sense that the air, a sighting of muddy river, or that outcrop of rock so implacably bland in the light of midday, is undertowed by memory.

Southward and in the very center of the plain is La Mesa, hidden in the mesquite and with splendid, typically dug, wells.