the alliance […] between logic and metaphysics

This is today's newspaper.

What he worried about was any eventual convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere.

We motorbiked all over the US that summer.