[Image: “One PM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.
(Jack Gilbert [source])
…and:
We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn’t. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right; we simply don’t have the time. Never be afraid of fear.
(C. JoyBell C. [one source… but it’s hard to say for sure: she’s quoted all around the Internets, has published some books, but none of them seem to be available in e-form])
Not from whiskey river:
What is meant by “reality”? It would seems to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates… So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.
(Virginia Woolf [source])
…and:
Once scientists knew the diameter of a typical atom, they could estimate the number of atoms in the typical human body. That number?
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s 1028. I invite you to count all twenty-eight zeroes and make sure I didn’t miss one. Now, I don’t know about you, but this staggering number gives me vertigo. Think about it. It means that the atoms in a human body are far, far more numerous than the sand grains on all the beaches of the Earth; than the leaves and needles on all the trees of the Earth’s forests; than the number of seconds since the turmoil of the Big Bang; than the heartbeats of all the people who have ever lived upon our planet; than even the stars—not just the ones you can see in a dark sky, not just the hundreds of billions in our Milky Way galaxy—far more numerous than all the stars in all the galaxies across the entire visible universe.
(Matt Strassler [source])
_____
Note: today’s post title shamelessly cribbed from E.E. Cummings.
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