That’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Rules
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
The Dark
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.
Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
Monday, April 18, 2022
Sunday, September 19, 2021
To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred…. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls: every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it today…. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures….
The old idea of the vitality of the universe was evolved long before history begins, and elaborated into a vast religion before we get a glimpse of it. When history does begin, in China or India, Egypt, Babylonia, even in the Pacific and in aboriginal America, we see evidence of one underlying religious idea: the conception of the vitality of the cosmos, the myriad vitalities in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array: and man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing, life, vitality, more vitality: to get into himself more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos…. This was the idea at the back of all the great old civilizations. It was even, half-transmuted, at the back of [King] David's mind, and voiced in the Psalms. But with David the living cosmos became merely a personal god. With the Egyptians and Babylonians and Etruscans, strictly there were no personal gods. There were only idols or symbols. It was the living cosmos itself, dazzlingly and gaspingly complex, which was divine, and which could be contemplated only by the strongest soul, and only at moments.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
Friday, January 08, 2021
Humans were one lucky tribe of apes with just enough intelligence and creativity to build a badly functioning civilization. And being only barely competent, there was no reason to believe that humanity's greatest achievements amounted to anything more than the average anthill lost on the infinitely intriguing savanna.
Robert Reed, "Integral Nothings" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February, 2021)
Friday, June 12, 2020
Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God
Friday, February 28, 2020
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (VIII,52)
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Contemplate the courses of the stars, as one should do that revolves along with them. Consider also without ceasing the changes of elements, one into another. Speculations upon such things cleanse away the filth of this earthly life.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book 7)
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
For if everything that is were unlimited, there would not be anything of such a character that it could be recognized.
Philolaus (a Pythagorean)
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Sunday, November 03, 2019
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Bruno Snell on Xenophanes
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Natural Teleology
See also: http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2018/01/if-there-was-cosmological-design-what.html
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos
Monday, June 22, 2015
Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Sunday, May 03, 2015
Kip Thorne, The Science of Interstellar
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Review.
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
Abhinavagupta, as quoted by Diana L. Eck in India: a Sacred Geography