“The tradecraft of the modern-day special operator, parachuting into the Hindu Kush after the Taliban,” echoes “the efforts of men from a preindustrial community struggling through New England winters on hickory and deergut snowshoes,” Ross writes.

We should place two units of horse and one of foot on this side of the field.

[…] if they had not been lifted in the air by the enormous accident of a man of genius, the Dickenses, I fancy, would have appeared in poorer and poorer places, as inventory clerks, as caretakers, as addressers of envelopes, until they melted into the masses of the poor.

He reminisced the old Parvati who was now this Parvati.