One sentence!

"For Hans Castorp understood that this living body--with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown firm enough to support the rest; with its joints made of tendons, cartilage, and slippery, well-oiled balls and sockets; with its more than two hundred muscles; with its central system of organs for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli; with its protective membranes, serous cavities, and glands pumping secretions; with its complicated interior, a network of pipes and crevices, including openings onto the world outside--understood that this self was a living entity of a higher order, far removed from those simple organisms that breathed, fed, even thought, with just the surface of their bodies, that it was constructed, rather, out of a myriad of small organized units, which all shared a common origin, but had multiplied by constantly dividing, had adapted and combined for various functions, and had then separated to develop on their own and germinated new forms that were both the prerequisite and the effect of its growth"--The Magic Mountain

"The German army hasn't undertaken a winter offensive since Frederick the Great.  That's why I expect them to do exactly that!"--Patton

Thursday I had lunch with Pam at Butler's Pantry in Mirvish Village. (She's a mycobacteriologist, so she's read The Magic Mountain.) Afterward I went to The Beguiling, also in Mirvish Village, and bought the fourth and last volume of Shigeru Mizuki's history-memoir of Japan under Hirohito, covering 1953 to 1989.  I'm looking forward to it, but I don't dare start it till I've finished The Magic Mountain!

Yesterday I finished digging up the potatoes.  Now I can focus on expanding the garden's area. (Lucky it's supposed to get warm again next week!)

Saw Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton on Netflix tonight (for at least the third time). George C. Scott is the movie!  Patton was a madman, but that's what a nation sometimes needs.  Like India needed Gandhi, a madman for peace.

I've finally quit the online game Forge of Empires.  I'd got all the way into the modern era, but it was taking too much of my life.