After-Orts #26
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms.... The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part…. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics
The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never dream of regretting.
-- the magician Merlin, in T. H. White’s Once and Future King
The Plain People are worth dying for until you bunch them and give them the cold Once-Over, and then they impress the impartial Observer as being slightly Bovine, with a large Percentage of Vegetable Tissue.
-- George Ade, The Civic Improver and the Customary Reward, in Hand-Made Fables
- quoted in a remarkable, touching, intermittently hilarious, long essay about S.J. Pererlman in The New York Review, July 16, 1987:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/07/16/knowing-sj-perelman/