page 204: two states of...trying to live utterly in the moment, and...trying to live in memory of reflection. Julian Baggini points out that Søren Kierkegaard articulated something like this:
Human beings are caught...between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both,but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.
Chapter 8: Human
page 118: human hands have fine motor skills. They are also essential, in coordination with arms and shoulders, in accurate throwing:
Other primates can fling objects with force, but underarm and with a poor aim. Only humans can launch a projectile such as a spear or a rock from over the shoulder with power and precision. This ability depends on several unique anatomical features. The shoulder is more forward-facing than in other apes and is capable of freer rotation. The wrist, too, seems to be uniquely adapted for a throwing action.
...our accurate overarm throw [may have been] a key force in human evolution. As well as allowing hunting and scavenging for all-important protein, it has also been credited with driving brain changes involved in fine motor control, which underpin the evolution of language and technology.
page 119: Gary Marcus addresses the question what makes humans unique?here. Friedrich Nietszche wrote:
I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense -- as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
page 124: running keeps us...human. An extreme case in The All Terrain Human. My experience here. In his new book Running with the Pack Mark Rowlands writes:
In the beating heart of the run, I hear an echo of what I once was and what I once knew. When the heartbeat of the run embraces me, holds me tight, I am returned to what I was before the fall. When the rhythm of the run holds me tight, I run in a field of joy...
This is the ninth in a new series
of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined
Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an
earlier series that appeared around UK publication.
...when we generate evolutionary explanations for why we behave the way we do, for why our bodies function as they do, we need to be cognizant of the possibility that other animals’ presence is shaping our selves. We must think about the bodies and behaviors of other animals as core parts of the ecologies in which we exist and, thus, include them as part of the suite of central influences in our own evolution. We did not make it in the world alone; we made it as part of a multispecies ecology...
It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.
-- from The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (1759) quoted by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).
Much of what we take for granted about our inner lives, from visual perception to memories, is little more than an elaborate construct of the mind. The self is just another part of this illusion.
And it seems to serve us well. In that respect, the self is similar to free will, another fundamental feature of the human experience now regarded by many as an illusion. Even as the objective possibility of free will erodes, our subjective experience of it remains unchanged: we continue to feel and act as though we have it.
The same will surely be true about the self. The illusion is so entrenched, and so useful, that it is impossible to shake off. But knowing the truth will help you understand yourself – and those around you – better.
What a chimera is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.
Blaise Pascal, quoted by Steven Pinker in an epigraph to The Better Angels of Our Nature
...Ethologists who study animal behaviour increasingly accept the idea that fear keeps animals away from predators, lust draws them toward each other, panic motivates their social solidarity and care glues their parent-offspring bonds. Just like us, they have an inner life because it helps them navigate their outer life...
...After you spend time with wild animals in the primal ecosystem where our
big brains first grew, you have to chuckle at the reigning view of the
mind as a computer...Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional
embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond
syntax to semantics, we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich
in feelings before they were adept in computations...The brain that ‘feels’ precedes the brain that ‘thinks’...
[the singularity] could be the best or worst thing ever to happen to life as we know
it, so if there's even a 1% chance that there'll be a singularity in our
lifetime, I think a reasonable precaution would be to spend at least 1%
of our GDP studying the issue and deciding what to do about it. Yet we
largely ignore it, and are curiously complacent about life as we know it
getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not
worried.
page 374: play. Attributed to Heraclitus:"We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play." In the final chapter of Religion in Human Evolution, Robert Bellah quotes from FriedrichSchiller'sOn the Aesthetic Education of Man:
Certainly nature has given even to the creatures without reason more than the bare necessities of life, and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence. When a lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display...The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is the mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.
Schiller -- notes Bellah -- contrasts “the sanction of need, or physical seriousness” with the “sanction of superfluity, or physical play,” but suggests that human play, though beginning in physical play, can move to a level of aesthetic play in which the full spiritual and cultural capacities of humans can be given free reign:
Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a Man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.
Also of note is what Schiller says about play and time:
The sense impulse requires variation, requires time to have a content; the form impulse requires the extinction of time, and no variation, Therefore the impulse in which both are combined (allow me to call it provisionally the play impulse), this play impulse would aim at the extinction in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being,of variation with identity.
page 375: cell biology. Since I finished writing even more ambitious visualizations than those at molecularmovies.com have been created. Our Secret Universe includes some clips of an astonishing film broadcast by the BBC in October 2012.
towers are more than simply structures; rather, they are primal images of verticality that illustrate the verticality of the human being. So, in our dreams we always go up towers (whereas we always go down into a cellar). Towers are images of ascension, the...winding steps inside them leading to dreams of flight or transcendence.
In The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, the A Bao A Qu (see Introduction, page xix) lurks on the steps of the Tower of Victory in Chitor, from the top of which you can look out over "the loveliest landscape in the world."
I'm about a third of the way into The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright (2010), one of several books I wish I had read before writing Japanese macaque. Here's a summary of Seabright's argument from his introduction:
the unplanned but sophisticated coordination of modern industrial societies is a remarkable fact that needs an explanation. Nothing in our species' biological evolution has show us to have any talent or taste for dealing with strangers.
the explanation is to be found in the presence of institutions that make human beings willing to treat strangers as honorary friends.
when human beings come together in the mass, the unintended consequences are sometimes startlingly impressive, sometimes very troubling
the very talents for cooperation and rational reflection that could provide solutions to our most urgent problems are also the source of our species terrifying capacity for organized violence between groups. Trust between groups needs as much human ingenuity as trust between individuals.
And from page 78:
reducing levels of violence has required us not to sideline the emotions but to harness them.
Humans are as ritualistic today as they have ever been. This is not a
comment on the changing fortunes of organised religion in different
parts of the world (growing and spreading in some places while
undoubtedly declining in others). It is a point about the profoundly
ritualistic character of all human cultures, whether in families,
schools, workplaces, governments, or international relations.
Rituals persist even where gods do not. Even the most secular
political systems ever devised — for instance, those under the sway of
historical materialism and its vision of a Communist utopia — were as
devoted to ritual as any in human history.
We can contrast two distant relatives: the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli and its host, ourselves. We span the spectrum of complexity in living organisms: the bacterium has minimal capability for perceiving and reacting to short term changes in its environment, whereas the major portion of our body is devoted to these tasks.
E coli commit less than 5% of their molecular machinery to motion and perception, allowing the simplest responses...Our bodies, in contrast, are built for specific, directed motion under the control of detailed, reasoned perception. The bulk of our body weight is dedicated to sense, reaction and motion. Cells in our retina are filled with arrays of opsin proteins for sensing light, light that is focused by layers of eye lens cells packed full of clear crystallin proteins. Cells in our skin spin enormously long strands of keratin protein into hairs, and other cells sense their slightest movement. These and other sensory data are transmitted and processed by nerve cells that carry electrical currents propagated by proteins and insulated by concentric layers of lipid. Fine control of movement is accomplished by an enormous skeleton of mineralized bone cells, moved by muscle cells filled with proteins that do nothing but contract, all glued together by connective tissue cells that build tough layers of sugar and protein. However, the common thread of life on Earth still shows through the diversity, tying the simplicity of the bacterium to the complexity of our bodies. All of these unique molecular machines are built of the same four molecular components -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and polysaccharides.
-- from The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell.
The title of this post is from an essay by Ken MacLeod. See also In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop.
Sixteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Chapter 8: Human
page 125: something very much like music played a central role [in human evolution]. In addition to Steven Mithen and Aniruddh Patel see The “Musilanguage” Model of Music Evolution (pdf) by Steven Brown.
page 126: spiritual and religious practices. See Robert Bellah:
Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focussed mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.
Because music is so powerful, it can also be applied to destructive ends. So, for example, while evidence suggests it was the British government which pioneered a particularly effective combination of torture techniques (stress positions, starvation, hooding, sleep deprivation and white noise), music rather than white noise has been used by others in attempts to break down psychological integrity. Examples include this by the Nazis and this by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Fifteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Chapter 8: Human
page 121: humans...appear to be the only animals anxious about what makes them unique. Helene Guldberg emphasizes the differences:
Human beings, like no other animal, have culture, we can exert some control over nature, and we’ve made life-changing inventions. We’ve built cities, nation states, governments, we’ve created language, we’ve invented the alphabet and other forms of written symbol and produced art and literature. We can diagnose illnesses and cure them, we have a sense of right and wrong and we have a sense of where we want to take society. Animals don’t have any of those things.
The Earth systems scientists Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson think human language (which, of course, enables arts, institutions, and science) is one of eight major revolutions in the history of life. (See page 167 and their book Revolutions that Made the Earth.) More than a few philosophers (among them Mark Rowlands) and primatologists (among them Frans de Waal) would disagree with Guldberg's claim that a sense of right and wrong is unique to humans. There is good evidence, too, for culture in (among others) chimpanzees and dolphins, albeit vastly more limited than in humans.
page 121: an ability to inhibit automatic responses in favour of reasoned ones. This is, arguably, the big question: can humans learn to constrain their own growth? Or do we, as Charles C. Mann puts it, "have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it"?
page 123: 'Lucy' may have been adapted both for living in the trees and...on the ground. See this from David J. Green and Zeresenay Alemseged (also here).
page 123 Early humans liked to eat meat. See this and this.
page 124: running is central to what keeps us most human and healthy. I like this idea, probably because I like running! Not everyone agrees though!
We're unique in the history of mammals. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like the degree we do. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
Sara Blaffer Hrdy’s gracefully written, expert account of human behavior focuses on the positive, and its most important contribution is to give cooperation its rightful place in child care. Through a lifetime of pathbreaking work, she has repeatedly undermined our complacent, solipsistic, masculine notions of what women were meant “by nature” to be. Here as elsewhere she urges caution and compassion toward women whose maternal role must be constantly rethought and readjusted to meet the demands of a changing world. Women have done this successfully for millions of years, and their success will not stop now. But neither Hrdy nor I nor anyone else can know whether the strong human tendency to help mothers care for children can produce the species-wide level of cooperation that we now need to survive.
There is no shortage of fantastical ways in which people imagine the end of humanity. Some of them lead to harmful behaviour. Putting aside cults, scare-mongering and general foolishness, however, the ultimate end of our species is a matter with which we need to engage seriously. And that is one of the reasons I think Kathleen Jamie’s On Rona is a small masterpiece: intentionally or otherwise, it allows for a meditation on human extinction. [1]
Our species has probably only come close to complete extinction once, in the remote past. [2] Given the stupendous numbers of us alive today and our energy and resourcefulness/ruthlessness, it can seem hard to believe that our end will ever actually come, barring some an unforeseen and/or uncontrollable cataclysm. [3] But while our future may be indefinite, it is surely not infinite. [4]
How do we relate to this apparently remote fact emotionally? How should we? Is it really so much harder for an individual to relate to than the fact of his/her own mortality? Perhaps we can go with Lawrence Krauss: 'We shouldn’t be depressed that we’ll disappear; we should be thrilled that we’re here right now.' [5]
Most of us would want the final end to be far away -- for the story of humanity to have a long way to go as yet. (For those of us who love our children, the idea that they or their successors will face tragedy and annihilation can seem unspeakably painful.) But would not an endless future, were it possible, be -- well -- rather boring? Even a very good story can get tedious if it goes on too long. There's a kind of incontinence to imagining an endless future. [6] The best stories by contrast, have an arc through time. (If we imagine trans-human or post-human stories we should do so with great caution and humility. [7])
We know enough to understand that in the near term the world needs mindfulness and cherishing. Some of the most relevant stories for the 21st century are, therefore, likely to centre on ways that we try to manage and control our appetites and fears, and on attempts to repair the world (and our ways) -- on efforts to slow the rate at which the whole universe of natural beings is turned into an undifferentiated 'standing reserve' of energy. [8]
The counter-desecration phrasebook suggested by Finlay Macleod and further sketched by Robert Macfarlane might help. Such a phrasebook would recall and revive some of the ways in which people comprehended the world before industrialization. It might contain equivalents to (for example) the Gaelic phrase Rionnach maoim, which means 'the shadows cast on moorland by cumulous clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day.' This 'unfeasible' phrasebook, writes Macfarlane, would stand, 'not as competitor to scientific knowledge and ecological analysis but as their supplement and ally.' [9]
It's a beautiful idea. And if it is 'unfeasible' then this does not have to be because of competition or contradiction between scientific and poetic ways of seeing. To take just one example, the fact that algae such as Chroomonas (and possibly other life forms) exploit quantum phenomena can only enhance our sense of wonder. No, the unfeasibility would have more to do with the likelihood that a mythic (dreamtime) state of mind (being) is hard for us to access in a sustained manner because we cannot pretend innocence of the history of our civilization.
Footnotes
1. That, at least, is one of the resonances I find in the piece. (Wiser readers may disagree!) Certainly, On Rona contains much else. Consider, for example:
I had the sensation I always have on Atlantic Islands, in summertime, when the clouds pass quickly and light glints on the sea -- a sense that the world is bringing itself into being moment by moment.
This sentence captures very well something I tried to approach in Hypnagogia when I suggested that, though superficially stationary, an island can be like a boat and so resemble Nicholas Humphrey's image for consciousness itself. The shifting seas make more readily apparent the fourth dimension of time through which the island/boat travels (although if Julian Barbour is correct, time itself is an illusion).
2. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that between about 77,000 and 69,000 years ago the impacts of a volcanic super-eruption reduced humans to a small number of breeding pairs. Plagues and famines throughout subsequent human history, though catastrophic, have only extirpated humans locally. Perhaps the moment we came closest to extinction in recent years was the Cuban missile crisis, although it's likely that a remnant would have pulled through even the worst nuclear winter and repopulated the planet.
We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognise that our existence is governed by material realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalises it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous people of Australia is that they recognise this and we do not.
4. For Werner Hertzog that end is quite imaginable. Talking to Lawrence Krauss, Cormac McCarthy and Science Friday presenter Ira Flatow ( 8 April 2011), Herzog said, 'It is quite evident that humans as a species will vanish quite quickly - maybe two or three hundred years, maybe three thousand years, maybe thirty thousand years. It doesn’t make me nervous that soon we’ll have a planet that doesn’t contain human beings.' For more on Herzog and 'the necessary catastrophe' see Hari Kunzru's fine profile.
5. Same source as footnote 4. Krauss's sentiment can be taken as a kind of species-wide positive thinking of the kind recommended by Steve Jobs for the individual (if not necessarily followed by the corporation he leads. [Added 30 April: see this too]). We need to recognize our limits in order to be human. Indeed, as Adam Gopnik writes, 'Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree it is our mortality.' See also The Most Important Fact.
6. In a meditation on Crusoe's island, the novel, rare birds and the death of his friend David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen notes boredom as a great enemy in his life. DFW was mentally ill, but boredom with self and with species is not necessarily insanity. Indefinite life extension seems deeply mistaken. As was recently written of Ray Kurzweil, 'One wonders how much of life he is missing by overthinking death.'
7. I think I share Giles Fraser's unease about Sam Harris's readiness to sacrifice humanity to the cause of a greater being. As Martin Rees and others have seen, perhaps more clearly than Harris, we have hardly begun to get our bearings on the non-human future. As Paul Broks wrote after interviewing Rees in 2010 :
We may, as a species, be suffering the cosmic equivalent of Anton’s syndrome, the neurological condition in which patients rendered totally blind by damage to the visual cortex believe they can see perfectly well. Perhaps the universe is an act of imagination. There’s no “perhaps” about it. The universe is an act of imagination, which is not to say there’s no “real world out there,” rather that our construction of it is shaped, and inescapably confined, by the powers of the human mind. Perhaps on a cosmic scale we are cosmically stupid.
An open-ended possibilianism, a la David Eagleman may be the way to go.
8. 'Standing reserve' (Bestand) is from Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology (1949). The struggle to prevent mindless destruction may be lost much of the time, but that does not mean one should give up. As Cormac McCarthy put it in his conversation with Krauss and Hertzog, 'Just because I am pessimistic about a lot of things, that’s no reason to be miserable about them.' See also Towards a Green Stoic Philosophy.
9. A Counter Desecration Phrasebook by Robert Macfarlane appears in Towards Re-enchantment: Place and Its Meanings (2010) along with Kathleen Jamie's On Rona and essays by nine other writers.
The brain, [Bronowski] understands, is not just an instrument for action. It is an instrument for preparation; it both drives the human hand and is driven by it; it is an instrument wired to learn, control speech, plan and make decisions.
...[Bronowski] reminds us that from the printed book comes "the democracy of the intellect" and that humans are primarily ethical creatures.
-- from Tim Radford's review of the reissued Ascent of Man.
In a 2006 article about the Turing Test, the Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein writes, “One thing is certain: whereas the [human decoys] in the competition will never get any smarter, the computers will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former...
...No, I think that, while the first year that computers pass the Turing Test will certainly be a historic one, it will not mark the end of the story. Indeed, the next year’s Turing Test will truly be the one to watch—the one where we humans, knocked to the canvas, must pull ourselves up; the one where we learn how to be better friends, artists, teachers, parents, lovers; the one where we come back. More human than ever.
A couple of small exercises in reframing and/or speculation channeled by Adam Gopnik:
Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree it is our mortality.
Perhaps the real truth is this: the Singularity is not on its way -- the Singularity happened long ago. We have been outsourcing our intelligence, and our humanity, to machines for centuries.
Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamed of. And there are other beings, equally real, which for most of human experience have been beyond imagining. As Zhuangzi wrote some 2,300 years ago, “all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated.”
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. misattributed to Bertrand Russell
Since we cannot predict how ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes. Derek Parfit
We are never 'at home': we are always outside ourselves. Michel de Montaigne
We are monkeys with money and guns. Tom Waits
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Albert Einstein
If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside! Tristan Tzara
Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.
Carl Woese
When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days. 'Qfwfq' 75 percent to 90 percent of all living species may remain unknown to science. IIES
Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Roger Revelle (1957)
The rate of change of ocean acidity is many times faster than anything experienced in the last 55 million years. EPOCA
One cannot reasonably compare the K/T extinction with the current human destruction of the biosphere. The first was a relatively minor setback.
J.C. Briggs
When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.
The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go here on earth and probably far beyond. Martin Rees
Our quest, as a civilisation [is] to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?
Jaron Lanier
If you yourself want to become really happy...I suggest you save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.
Margaret Atwood
There is just one real problem -- the problem of human relations.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.
Joseph Conrad
"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
'The Walrus and the Carpenter'
We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more.
'The Giant, O'Brien'
We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
'Austerlitz'
Those were his first steps on a white sheet/Clutches of wriggling letters in black lead/Like tracks of worms on the Precambrian mud.
'Kaspar Hauser'
The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines.
Spinoza
We are as much automaton as mind. Blaise Pascal
Much that is intelligent in us is not specifically human. Alasdair MacIntyre
What knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?Herman Melville
There is no counting the possible ways to the Millennium and the route to it. Norman Cohn
By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around. Dario Maestripieri
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. George Orwell
The astounding comes towards us, outrider of death and birth. John Berger
We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof.
Thomas Browne
Even that old horse
is something to see
this snow-covered morning
Matsuo Basho
We cannot see the visible except with the invisible.
Eckhart von Hochheim
You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book. Paul Erdős
If, as the poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve best to pass away the long night.
Charles Darwin
But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most warn by the generations of pilgrims.
Jorge Luis Borges
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Let Peter rejoice with the MOON FISH who keeps up the life in the waters by night. Let Andrew rejoice with the Whale, who is array'd in beauteous blue and is a combination of bulk and activity. Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his ink. Let John rejoice with Nautilus who spreads his sail and plies his oar, and the Lord is his pilot. Let Philip rejoice with Boca, which is a fish that can speak.
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee? The Book of Job
