“Impressions at the Extremity of Civilization” by Ben Pace

Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week.

Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it. Importantly the chronology and especially some of the vaguer events are not real.

[Friday] Today I find myself walking with the groundskeeper, Hogan. He is an older gentleman, skin bronzed by years in the sun, fingers calloused by the carrying of stones and the digging in soil. He lives a slower life than the rest of us, the impact of his work felt over seasons rather than hours, and his conversation too carries at the slowest pace of any man or woman I have course to speak with in life. He is knowledgeable about the plants that grow throughout our plot of land, he can quickly tell me which plants will grow back and which ones are lost causes. Like many of the plants, he himself is under-maintained, and I only tend to spend [...]

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First published:
June 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J4XtisYDx5hESpnTj/impressions-at-the-extremity-of-civilization

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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