Thursday

A great passage from The Freeman Book. It's from a review-essay of the Letters of Ambrose Bierce, by Van Wyck Brooks:

San Francisco, his home for a quarter of a century, he describes as “the paradise of ignorance, anarchy and general yellowness. . . . It needs,” he remarks elsewhere, “another quake, another whiff of fire, and–more than all else–a steady trade wind of grapeshot.” It was this latter–grapeshot is just the right word–that Bierce himself poured into that “moral penal colony,” the worst, as he avers, “of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs in our modern world”; and his collection of satirical epigrams shows us how much he detested it.

Both perceptive and prescient, that Bierce.