But that passage from Alan Watts’s book (the chapter title is “Dawn in the Western Sky”) has always been a favorite of mine. Glad you liked it, too!

marta: After seeing your comment, I looked around some more on the Web. Yep: photic sneeze reflex is a real thing. The paper which The Straight Dope‘s “Cecil” mentions is here.

Somewhere, by some author, there’s a line which begins something like, “The world is so full of so many wonderful things, that…” Photic sneeze reflex strikes me as one of those things.

Jules: The cosmic stuff is, if you ask me, the perfect stuff to think about when worried about something minor. Immediately shrinks it from “minor” to “not really important.” And I loved that video. The Symphony of Science Web site says they’ve got (I think) four videos out now, but I thought so much of “A Glorious Dawn” that I didn’t watch the others — afraid they wouldn’t live up, so to speak.

Froog: Oh dang. I hate it when I do that. Corrected, for all the world to see and snicker over! (It does sound like a Cage composition, but I wonder if he just took off from Paul Simon — or vice-versa?)

Somehow, I’d managed to go almost my entire life without encountering the wonderful Newton quotation… and then suddenly, in the last year, saw it 3-4 times. Maybe I’m just keeping more erudite company these days!

Isaac Newton summed up his career as a scientist with this beautiful image of the ocean as a metaphor for The Unknown: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

I think about this kind of stuff (the earth being the shore of the cosmic ocean, that is) when I’m obsessing/worrying/fretting over something minor.

And really? Photic sneeze reflex? Seriously? Or am I being had?

I was taken by how strong memory flooded me at the description of the sunrise over the West Coast. I’ve been to Big Sur (not sure about Willow Creek specifically though) and, in fact, the northern California coast is one of my favorite places in the world (not being a world-traveler, I may have to revise later, but for now it is).

I’ve always wanted to see the East Coast as well, but I’ve not made it yet. Close, but not quite. I long for the waves of the agitated Atlantic crashing over a rocky shoreline, but maybe that’s only fantasy. I can’t know. Not yet, at least.

Oh, and watching the sun RISE over the ocean instead of SETTING over it would be interesting. I’ve never had the sun set behind me while watching the ocean pulse.

Evocative post. I’m sure none of this is what you intended for your readers to come away with, but such is the hamster on a wheel in my so-called mind … ever straying from it’s circular path.

Have a great weekend!