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Thus the world, whenever it appears as a physical universe*, must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Essential Lectures, Meditation
- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage
- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919)
The Riddle of the Universe
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Google's translation of Einstein’s original quotation
As for its origin—in the beginning was fable.
It will be there always."
- Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
"On Poe's Eureka" in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground
- Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Postscript. In February of this year, I wrote about how the morning walks my wife and I took together during the pandemic (which we could do since I did not have to commute to my regular office; something which, sadly, I've had to resume doing recently) gave me an opportunity to see and appreciate how much beauty our local neighborhood offers. Back then, I was mesmerized with the "hosta-leaf corpses" that littered the sidewalks near our house, and which appeared to glow with a preternatural inner light. To communicate a sense of what first drew me to them (i.e., their radiance), I rendered them using reversed black and white tones (a small portfolio is here). Almost a year later, as we approach late autumn, I find my eye/I drawn to the radiance - or, better, to the colorful afterglow - of decaying maple leaves. Just as the all-but-decayed hosta leaves stubbornly clung to life with a mysterious and inexhaustible energy, the just-starting-to-decay maple leaves are now doing the same, but are suffused in an ineffably iridescent brilliance! There is a palpable fire burning inside that refuses to let go! I've tried to capture this ethereal energy by placing the leaves on a light table (using one that is sufficiently bright to illuminate the veins of the leaves), and rendering the final image on a dark backdrop in Photoshop. Although, as with the hostas, my maple macros only partly convey the excitement I felt as I encountered individual leaves, much of my raw emotion remains (albeit only in "Stieglitzian Equivalent" form). The image above is an amalgam of the photographs in a new "maple autumn macros" portfolio. Enjoy 😊
- Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950)
"In a forest of a hundred thousand trees,
no two leaves are alike.
And no two journeys along
the same path are alike."
- Paulo Coelho (1947 - )
Aleph
"We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe."
"Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don't chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before."
- George Lakoff (1941 - )
- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)
- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
Tales of Power