quotes
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Happy birthday to Sir William Gilbert, half of Gilbert and Sullivan and the librettist responsible for “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.“
2. Science may be inching ever closer to giving us lab-grown meat. It reminds me of all sorts of science fiction.
3. Here’s something to ponder from Ed Abbey, whom I always thought of as curmudgeonly. But maybe he wasn’t as hard as I thought:
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
I Declare It Carl Sagan Day
Happy birthday to Carl Sagan today! To celebrate Carl Sagan Day, you could watch the introduction to the Cosmos series, which is still the most popular science program ever produced for television*:
Or you could read this from Ann Druyan, which is simultaneously heartbreaking and joyful:
Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again…But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is…We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. That pure chance could be so generous and so kind; that we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, “in the vastness of space and the immensity of time”; that we could be together for twenty years; that is something which sustains me…That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
Happy birthday, Carl. I like to picture you somewhere in that “ship of the imagination” from Cosmos.
*You’ve all heard that a sequel to Cosmos is in the works for 2013, right? Ann Druyan is helping to write/produce and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will host. I can’t wait.
To The Desert
I’m headed to the desert by Moab soon to make my inner hippie happy and get some perspective. Here’s Paul Bowles‘ feelings about it (even though his desert was the Sahara):
Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating…Once [someone] has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price.
Friday Unrelated Information
1. I have the day off! I originally planned it as just a break from a really rocky September, but now I can hopefully get a new computer and have my friends help me with data recovery on Old Paint. Yay, shopping!
2. I can’t say enough how nice it is to have friends so generous in sharing their skills.
3. Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address has been making the rounds this week, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. He was a wise man.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
[…] Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Something Else To Ponder
Switch your thoughts from cows and jazz to Michael Cunningham and impermanence with this passage from The Hours. I don’t even think it’s as sad as I did when I first read it–now I think it offers some good perspective:
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book […]
What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
New Things
Tonight I am going to a chamber music concert. By myself. This is the first time I’ve been brave enough to go solo to an event and I’m proud of myself before the fact.
My BFF M.F.K. Fisher wrote about dining alone, and I like to think I’m channeling the same spirit here–just with a concert instead of dinner:
I came to believe that since nobody else dared to feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, with as much aplomb as I could muster.
If you need me, I’ll be attending a concert with aplomb.
Another Birthday
I know this makes thing pretty author-heavy this week, but I couldn’t miss mentioning Hemingway’s birthday today!
(That is the manliest turtleneck I have ever seen. Well done, Papa.)
Today’s birthday quote comes from an archived LIFE interview from 1952 when he was awarded the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea:
“The right way to do it–style–is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fact that the right way also looks beautiful when it’s done is just incidental.”
Happy Birthday, Cormac McCarthy
Happy birthday to one of the two novelists who make me despair of ever writing anything as good: Cormac! I haven’t been reading him lately because I’ve been trying to keep an even emotional keel, but here’s something from All the Pretty Horses I posted back in 2007:
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
*The first writer who makes me want to give up is Virginia Woolf, of course.
He Makes Hobbies Sound Like A Bad Thing
I came across this C.S. Lewis quote a couple of weeks ago. I think it’s pretty popular, but I’ve never read anything from him other than Narnia, so it’s new to me.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
I guess it’s a good thing I’ve given my heart to Toby, because Clive here is making it sound like it would turn into a shriveled little lump of tar otherwise. (Although to be honest, the thought of an unbreakable tarry heart kind of appeals to me. Does that mean it’s already happened?)