[Video: scene from 12 Monkeys, in which the protagonists learn
the true intentions of a shadowy revolutionary movement]
From whiskey river:
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.“In return for this jasmine odor,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”“I have no roses; I have no flowers left now
in my garden… all are dead.”“Then, I’ll take the waters of the fountains,
and the yellow leaves and the dried-up petals.”The wind left… I wept. I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?”
(Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly [source])
…and:
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.
(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [source])
