:: Snippets that tickle my fancy
-The point is: what happens in heaven?
-Unknowable wonderfulness?
-Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.
from Look to Windward
by Iain M. Banks
229
“He looked up at the sky, which was covered by a thick layer of stratus clouds that moved slowly across the landscape. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the sun. Then, to the south, a small hole opened up in the cloud and a beam of light split to earth, warm and welcoming after the prolonged winter and dismal spring. The pool of bright sunlight fell to earth two fields away, startling some sheep who had forgotten they possessed shadows. Then the hole closed again, and soft, directionless light once more settled on the earth.”
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde, p331
There were bison crossing over the road–two thousand pound mammals crossing over the road… It was about 60 below 0. And the bison, as they breathed, their exhalation would seem to crystallize in the air around them and there were these sheets, these ropey strands of crystals kind of flowing down from their breath…
I felt like, this was the first day. And this morning was the first time the sun had ever come up. And the shadows that are being cast right now is the first time those shadows have ever been cast on the earth.
And I was all alone but I felt I was in the presence of everything around me and I was never alone.
It was one of those moments when you get pulled outside of yourself into the environment around you and I felt like I was just with the breath of the bison as they were exhaling and as I was exhaling and they were inhaling it was all kind of flowing together…
All I was thinking of was that a single moment in a place as wild as Yellowstone, and most of the National Parks, can last forever.
Shelton Johnson in National Parks, Episode 2 on his encounter with bison while delivering mail on snowmobile in Yellowstone National Park.
All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin’ in the sun,
Talkin’ ’bout the things
They woulda-coulda-shoulda done…
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little did.
by Shel Silverstein in Falling Up
I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with a map, with strangers’ contradictory anecdotal evidence. … Times when some architectural detail or vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. Stories that make the familiar strange again… Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forgot until I realize they have colored everything I felt and did that day. Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 13
In response to blogotomy’s post on Perception:
Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
…
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.
…
How many other things are we missing?
“What IS that?! What ARE they?!”
—Bronze haired woman who should have taken lessons from a little boy on how to use her camera. (her words!)
“Wow! Wow! Mom! Look at them!”
—Little boy in a big red shirt, pointing and looking up while walking, unseeing, down the ramp. Don’t fall!
“It’s like they have Mardi Gras masks on.”
—Sprightly but hunched old lady in a pale pink shirt and a white golf hat
“HO-LY SHH…! Look at the size of them!!”
—Stubbly skinny old man with his oldish buddies upon spotting the eagles