Einstein's Expanding Darkness

"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it." -- Albert Einstein

Malibu

some flicks I took up at Malibu last night.




































































George Duke's "Malibu"

"...the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides."

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”--Artur Schnabel, Austrian classical pianist.

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

another stolen poem. Great posting by Brian Fellows at Poem of the Week

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...


--Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The Maltese Falcon: Today's "Did You Know"

"After seven years of moving from place to place in Europe the Knights [Hospitaller] became established in 1530 when Charles V of Spain, as King of Sicily, gave them Malta, Gozo and the North African port of Tripoli in perpetual fiefdom in exchange for an annual fee of a single Maltese falcon, which they were to send on All Souls Day to the King's representative, the Viceroy of Sicily."

Who knew?
Not a fan of the Hammett book or the Bogart/Huston movie (neither of which apparently has anything to do with this falcon), but I still was amused to learn this.

"From our birthday, until we die...

...Is but the winking of an eye" - W.B. Yeats


"Age is a high price to pay for maturity." - Tom Stoppard

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to a hundred. - Woody Allen


Here's to maturity.

I feel, therefore I am

"I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism." - Milan Kundera, Immortality (205)