Man
can starve from
a lack of self-realization…
as much as from a lack
of bread.
let us become a bit more like turtles
I believe
that our species will
not last long. It does not seem
to be made of the stuff that has allowed
the turtle, for example to continue to exist more
or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of
years; for hundreds of times longer, that is,
than we have even been in existence.
We belong to a short-lived genus
of species. All of our cousins
are already extinct. What’s
more, we do
damage.
There
are frontiers where
we are learning, and our desire
for knowledge burns. They are in the
most minute reaches of the fabric of space,
at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time,
in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the
workings of our own thought processes.
Here, on the edge of what we know,
in contact with the ocean of the
unknown, shines the mystery
and the beauty of the world.
And it’s breathtaking.
R_{abcd}^{}=K(g_{ac}g_{db}-g_{ad}g_{cb})
neutrino associated with distant blazar jet
the
deeper the mystery, the
darker the night, the stronger
the gravitational pull,
the greater the
light
quiet inside
Thirty spokes
meet at a hollowed-out hub;
the wheel won’t work without its hole.
A vessel is moulded from solid clay; its inner
emptiness makes it useful. To make a room, you
have to cut doors and windows; without
openings, a place isn’t livable.
To make use of what is here,
you must make use of
what is not.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
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this brief life
And
it seems to me
that life, this brief life,
is nothing other than this:
the incessant cry of these emotions
that drive us, that we sometimes attempt
to channel in the name of a god, a political faith,
in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally,
everything is in order, in a great and boundless
love — and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes
it is a cry of pain. Sometimes
it is a song.
And song,
as Augustine observed,
is the awareness of time. It is time.
It is the hymn of the Vedas that is itself the
flowering of time. In the Benedictus of Beethoven’s
Missa Solemnis, the song of the violin is pure
beauty, pure desperation, pure joy. We are
suspended, holding our breath, feeling
mysteriously that this must be source
of meaning. That this is the
source of time.
Then the
song fades and ceases.
“The silver thread is broken,
the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at
the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well,
the earth returns to dust.” And it is fine like
this. We can close our eyes, rest. This all
seems fair and beautiful to me.
This is time.
