From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
This is just plain awesome. I am so excited to see how this campaign plays out.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Sagan
“This first Carl Sagan Day was a great success. We had a great audience at every talk, kids playing outside in the inflatable rocket ship bounce room, pictures from Hubble adorning the windows and walls of Broward College, and an overall sense that there is great work that has been done, with still a vast amount yet to do.
But that’s where the fun is. Sagan knew that, and I hope that you do too. And if you don’t — if you think science is stodgy, uninteresting, and doesn’t affect your life — then hopefully you have an amazing moment lying in wait for you. Maybe it’ll be a Cassini image of Saturn, or a tiny cell undergoing mitosis under your scrutiny through a microscope, or the sudden understanding from a news article about the Large Hadron Collider. There’s no way to know what precisely that trigger will be. But at some point there will come something that will jolt you, will shake you out of your complacence, and the scales will fall from your eyes.
At that moment you’ll experience what Carl Sagan did every moment of his life, that same sense of wonder and pure, undiluted joy about the Universe. I feel it too. It’s the blood in my veins, the calcium in my bones, the electricity of my eyes and ears as they relay what they detect to my brain. It’s the sense of connectedness with everything, and it’s real.
That’s what Carl Sagan taught us.”
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
– Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/11/09/carl-sagan-remembered/
57
“From the news store I go one block south to the Postal Convenience Station, where I am secretly in love with a woman behind the counter. I have already put my pages in the manila envelope. I address it, and then I take my place at the end of another long line. What I need now is postage! Yum, yum, yum!
The woman I love there does not know I love her. You want to talk about poker faces? When her eyes meet mine, she might as well be looking at a cantaloupe!
Because she works sitting down, and because of the counter and the smock she wears, all I have ever seen of her is from the neck up. That’s enough! From the neck up she is like a Thanksgiving dinner! I don’t mean she looks like a plateful of turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. I mean she makes me feel like that is what has just been set before me. Dig in! Dig in!
Unadorned, I believe, her neck and face and ears and hair would still be Thanksgiving dinner. Every day, though, she hangs new dingle-dangles from her ears and around her neck. Sometimes her hair is up, sometimes it’s down. Sometimes it’s frizzy, sometimes it’s straight. What she can’t do with just her eyes and lips! One day I’m buying a stamp from Count Dracula’s daughter! The next day she’s the Virgin Mary.
This time she’s Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli. But she is a long way off still. There are many addled old poops, no good at counting money anymore, and immigrants talking gibberish, maddeningly imagining it to be English, in line ahead of me.
One time I had my pocket picked in that Postal Convenience Center. Convenient for whom?
I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation.
I at last have my envelope weighed and stamped by the only woman in the whole wide world who could make me sincerely happy. With her I wouldn’t have to fake it.
I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!”
Excerpt: Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake.
For my girl behind the counter. The only woman in the whole wide world who makes me sincerely happy.
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
