Monday, September 28, 2026

I have made this [letter] longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter

 --- Blaise Pascal, in a letter in a collection called “Lettres Provinciales” in the year 1657

From QuoteInvestigator:

The first known instance in the English language was a sentence translated from a text written by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. The French statement appeared in a letter in a collection called “Lettres Provinciales” in the year 1657:1 2 3

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

Here is one possible modern-day translation of Pascal’s statement. Note that the term “one” refers to the letter itself.

I have made this one longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.

Saturday, September 05, 2026

Ōmagotoki . . . the time for meeting spirits and monsters

 --- From Yáng Shuāngzǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, Ch. 5, “Bah-Sò / Braised Minced Pork”, p. 95, footnote 3

Excerpt

We were scheduled to spend three days in Takao. On the first day, we took the express train from Taichū to Takao, which took four hours. It was ōmagotoki,[footnote 3] roughly five in the evening, by the time we arrived.

Footnote 3. King: Ōmagotoki is Japanese for the time of day when the sky grows dark. The kanji characters technically mean “the time for meeting spirits and monsters.”

Reference
yokai.jp, "Ōmagatoki (逢魔時) is a term that designates the dim twilight just before and after the sun sets as a "bad hour" when one is prone to encountering the uncanny. Rather than a single yōkai with a distinct form or will, it refers to the shifting boundary between day and night itself, when it becomes difficult to distinguish human faces or distant objects."

yokai com, "Ōmagatoki is the twilight hour between when the sun sets and the sky goes dark. It is not quite day, but not quite night. Shadows swallow everything. Your eyes start to play tricks on your mind. The border thins between sekai—the world we live in, belong to, and recognize—and ikai, the “other” world. Ikai is where the spirits live, a world about which we humans know next to nothing. During ōmagatoki, the evil spirits, the chimimōryō, wake up and move about freely. This is the hour when yōkai, yūrei, and other dark things cross over into our world."