Nagasawa Kanaye (1852-1934) - Real name was Isonaga Hikosuke. A California winemaker whose life story epitomizes the Westernization of a late-Edo-Period samurai. One of a group of young Japanese befriended by Laurence Oliphant, he was renamed and sent abroad by the Satsuma government, arriving in Great Britain in 1865. Through Oliphant he met and became a follower of Thomas Lake Harris, mystic and founder of the The Brotherhood of the New Life, a utopian commune in New York state. It's never been clear whether Nagasawa converted to Christianity, but when the group moved to California in 1875, he became developer and manager of the community's two thousand acres of vineyards near Santa Rosa. Eventually he inherited the estate, Fountain Grove, as sole owner and continued to run the community wine-making ventures. He also bred horses.
Santa Rosa's Own
A winemaker's remembrance of Mr. Nagasawa

Negative capability - A term invented by John Keats to describe his concept of creative receptivity. "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason--" Keats, however, sometimes vacillated between belief in this romantic passivity and in actively pursuing rational knowledge.

Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) - English engineer, one of the inventors of the steam engine. Constructed with Thomas Savery a superior pumping engine for removing water from mines. Also constructed with Savery an "atmospheric steam-engine," then known as a "fire-engine."

The Difference Dictionary was first published
in slightly different form in Science Fiction Eye, Issue #8.
Text copyright 1990, 1996, 2000, 2003,
by Eileen K. Gunn.