“Those who pass by us, do not go alone, and do not leave us alone; they leave a bit of themselves, and take a little of us.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“I’m Your Huckleberry.”
18+
Proust was right: life is represented more accurately by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is - or at least the world as it will become.
“Those who pass by us, do not go alone, and do not leave us alone; they leave a bit of themselves, and take a little of us.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
It’s the secrets. They weigh us down. They keep us from knowing things clearly; they cover us like those shrouds on the mummies in the museum. We can’t hold them all, so we pretend they aren’t there. Except that makes everything worse… Secrets can make you crazy.
Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
Let us pray for the foxes sleeping in your knees.
May you always know when to run.
Let us pray for your head hitting the pillow, for your mouth when it whispers
“Enough. Enough of that now.”
O, pain.
O, it is no small thing, with its chariots and its kingdoms built on the backs of the suffering.
May you walk straight again in the free land.
When the light comes,
may you wear the morning well.
May you always keep part of it in your hands.
Let us pray for the courage roaring
in your colosseum chest,
that it stays hungry and that it wins.
Let us pray.
For your blessed bones.
For your sacred hands.
May you learn to love what is holy in you.
May you learn to love what is not.
To the ones that have not loved you like you deserve,
may you forget their names.
May you remember your own, always.
Amen. Amen.
“To read” actually comes from the Latin reri “to calculate, to think” which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein “to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,” arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma, meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.
“Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all!”
— A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace,
expressing Euler’s influence on mathematics
