“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past The hundred universes Proust describes would be even better viewed from distant lands
“But now her own big brain was urging her to take the polyethylene garment bag from around a red evening dress in her closet there in Guayaquil, and to wrap it around her head, thus depriving her cells of oxygen.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos The truth is, I’ll never have time to completely appreciate one of the hundreds of great musicians who’ve saved and enriched me, from Handel to Paolo
Make me cool and silent as the black cat that glides through the night beyond my open window. Pour down on my satiny skin a moon plump with Easter’s ancient promise, cascading like a string of pearls her numinous vernal generations. Settle on to my limber restless shadow just enough knowing to shake off the languid morning, never to grow too fond of comfort and cream. Send me serene across
Yesterday, had I been a millionaire able to hire a gardener or two, I — I still would have knelt in the earth and brushed back the crunchy leaves, to see, touch, oh! green shoots of new garlic. Yes, pruned scratchy rose bushes sucked blood from my thorn-stabbed thumb; cut back the lower aspen branches, plucked up the dry and dead tomato and pepper plants, snapped off hollyhock stalks. Yes, even
And still, it moves. The great man knew. He couldn’t let go of the naked truth of its scope, its beauty, but worship science? The powers will not have it; the solution: cognitive dissonance. Galileo. Like him, I know. He knew the center: Solitary and unworshipped by nature- roughed out of bonds by obvious revolutions; no soul, no sin, no hell: conflict unmasked. The Middle Way. Active, boundless, released from
My old friend Price Strobridge might begin like this: If the observable universe Is 13 billion years old, and I am 65, then I have been around 433 whatever comes after a billionth of the time the universe has been around. As far as the universe is concerned, I’m not even born yet. If the observable universe is 278 million light years around, and if nobody anywhere knows much of
