Notes on Wonder

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

John McFee, Annals of the Former World

“The whole of Seurat’s life was a slow, stubborn, tireless, and fanatic preparation to reach the formal perfection he achieved in his two masterworks.

In Bathers at Asnières, that perfection astonishes, and in a way, overwhelms us: the repose of the figures sunning themselves, bathing in the river, or contemplating the scenery, beneath a midday sun that seems to dissolve the distant bridge, the locomotive crossing it, and the chimneys of Passy into the dazzle of a mirage. This tranquility, this balance, and this secret harmony between man and water, cloud and sailboat, costume and oars are certainly manifestations of a total command of the medium, the sureness of line, and the use of color, all achieved by dint of effort; but they also represent an elevated and noble conception of the art of painting as a means of spiritual fulfillment and a source of pleasure in and of itself, in which painting is understood as its own best reward, a métier in the practice of which one finds meaning and joy.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, from The Language of Passion

“Recent work by Cassini scientists suggests that Enceladus [the sixth largest moon of Saturn] has a global ocean of liquid water under its surface. This discovery increases scientists’ interest in Enceladus and the quest to understand the role of water in the development of life in the solar system.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 0.3 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2015.”

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

“Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The farmer steadfastly refrained from thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage, because one never knows… In fact we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events.”

Alan Watts, referencing an old Chinese parable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqA3qQMKueA

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Johannes Brahms, on J.S. Bach’s Chaconne, Partita No. 2

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

“[This self portrait] shows us Rembrandt’s face during the later years of his life.  It was not a beautiful face, and Rembrandt certainly never tried to conceal its ugliness.  He observed himself in a mirror with complete sincerity.  It is because of this sincerity that we soon forget to ask about beauty or looks.  This is the face of a real human being…

We feel we know this man.  We have seen other portraits by great masters which are memorable for the way they sum up a person’s character and role.  But even the greatest of them may remind us of characters in fiction or actors on the stage.  They are convincing and impressive, but we sense that they can only represent one side of a complex human being.  Not even the Mona Lisa can always have smiled.  But in Rembrandt’s great portraits we feel face to face with real people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their loneliness and their suffering.”

E.H. Gombrich

Thoughts Haunting Me in Busy Streets

Faces.
Billions of faces on the surface of the world.
Supposedly each different
from those that were and will be.
But Nature—and who can really tell—
maybe tired from constant work
repeats her former ideas
and puts on us faces
already worn.

Maybe Archimedes in jeans is passing you by,
Catherine the Great in second-hand clothes,
one of the pharaohs with a briefcase, in glasses.

…

A widow of a barefoot cobbler
from a still small Warsaw,
the master from the cave of Altamira
taking grandchildren to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal on the way to a museum
to get his delight.

Billions of faces on the surface of the world.
Your face, mine, whose—
you will never find out.
Maybe Nature must cheat,
and to keep pace, and to keep up
she starts to cast for what is sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

Wisława Szymborska

“I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff or a rude reception. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance of occurrence of monstrous proportions. Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking at the gift horse in the mouth – remember you are a Black Swan.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

Carl Sagan