
Starry Night, by Takahashi Shotei, c. 1926. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Chuck Bowdlear, PhD, and John Borozan, MA.
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Miscellany
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.
—Doris Lessing, 1994