This book is turning out to be a culmination, a perfect culmination, of all that I’ve read and studied and thought and felt—not even in just these last few years, but perhaps for all 55 of them. Christopher Alexander is helping me synthesize all that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on: possibly because it’s a quality that has no name.

And the reasons this book has been in my hands and mind these past three or four days are wild, with the craziest likely being that a woman in a video on rammed earth houses used the phrase “pattern languages.”

What a wonderful life.