January 2011
20 posts
The New Zodiac
I’ve always felt more like a monocle than a Gemini. I mean, come on, I’m an only child.
I haven’t wound my pocket watch in a week, but it still ticks away at odd hours of the night. The time is wrong, but the beats are steady and the hands move like, well, clockwork. I don’t wear it every day and I think it’s a little indignant because of that. I hope it understands. In any case, I hope I still work that well, albeit more consistently, when I’m 98 years old.
“We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky. The open roads still softly calls. Our little terr-aqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds. We who cannot even put our own planetary home in order—riven with rivalries and hatreds—are we to venture out into space? By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We’re an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses: more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallabilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century and the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds in the solar system and beyond, will be unified by the common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of war potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”
—Carl Sagan (via girltano)
In the local coffee shop this afternoon, I saw a man order a large coffee and then proceed to take a nap. Discuss.
Oh, Tom Waits.
“The only thing I want that shines is to be King there in your eyes.”
Reading!
So, I finally finished The Trial. God, Kafka…
What shall I crack open next?
Happy birthday, Caley!
