So many stories. The young Robert Louis Stevenson said he always carried two books -- one to read from, the other to write in. His literary intake (from those books, from the world) and output (750,000 published words) were equally stunning, especially for a man who spent much of his life as an invalid. Born in Scotland, where his father held the job title of 'Keeper of the Northern Lights', Stevenson died at 44 on his plantation in Samoa. And in between: writing, writing, adventure, writing, and more writing: Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island, sure, but also lesser known gems like Travels with a Donkey in the Cevannes, a charming tale of man, beast, and revolutionary fur-lined "sleeping-sack".

Autumnal equinox. The days and nights are, for the briefest moment, equally long, everywhere on earth. Here in the north, fall is upon us -- good news or not, depending on whether one's poetic sensibility favors William Blake or Robert Frost. Either way, it's a time of year to pause and take stock of a now-completed harvest of stunningly intericate crop circles, or maybe just ponder the chemistry of all those autumn colors. Equations, anyone?

Witness. "I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are." Few writers can convincingly refer to the last hundred years as my century. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-Lithuanian poet, is one of them. A survivor of the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi occupation and Warsaw uprising, of Paris and Berkeley in the 1960s, and of exile upon exile upon exile, Milosz balances strident criticism of the grand philosophies of his (and our) era and equally incisive dissections of his own motives with a fierce, if reluctant, commitment to beauty, to humanity, and to God. The results, in poetry or prose, are stunning. For an excellent audio overview -- the life and work of Milosz in his own and his fellow poets' words -- head here.

Foreign relations. "Of all nations in the world, America is the most interesting to the Chinese." So begins the 1914 book of observations and anecdotes of Wu Tingfang, who spent years as the China's minister to the United States and adjacent countries. America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat is alternately amusing, insightful, and perplexing -- one moment finds Wu detailing the U.S. government's harshly discriminatory treatment of Chinese immigrants; a page or two later, he'll be marshalling an intricate argument as to why it would be in America's best interest to title their chief executive "Emperor" rather than "President". The fact that Wu offers an outsider's perspective of a bygone era makes his book, cheerfully digitalized by the good folks at Project Gutenberg, most interesting indeed.

What have you done for me, philately? One of the privileges of nationhood is that, no matter how tiny, war-torn, or politically insignificant your country might be, it has the ability to issue legal-tender postal stamps -- not so much for the mailing needs of the locals as for the worldwide community of stamp collectors, who will pay for anything colorful, rare, or otherwise of interest. Thus for some nations, stamp designs veer from the traditional topics (national events and icons, local flora and fauna) into less relevant, though more profitable, themes. Angola has issued stamps celebrating the United States Space Shuttle; Liberia chimes in "Achievements in Outer Space" and, in an even more mind-wrenching non sequitur, a stamp honoring the first Chinese NBA player; and in 1997, just in time for the outbreak of their horribly bloody civil war, Sierra Leone released these.