Life is paradise

afternoon at home

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Matter

Antelope Canyon 2009

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit (orig. geist). This spirit is the matrix of all matter."

Max Planck [1858-1947, German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918]

from Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)

the tonic of wildness

Walden - the book

We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Henry David Thoreau [Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, 1854] 

(free e-book on Project Gutenberg)

όσο μας επιτρέπουν οι χαραμάδες της φυλακής μας

Alcatraz cell / © I.A. Daglis

Αν το γυαλί απ' όπου βλέπουμε και αντιλαμβανόμαστε τον κόσμο ήταν πιο καθαρό, το καθετί θα φαινότανε στον άνθρωπο τέτοιο που πραγματικά είναι, δηλαδή χωρίς αρχή και τέλος.

Όμως ο άνθρωπος πήγε και κλείστηκε από μόνος του και περιορίστηκε σε τέτοιο σημείο, που να μη βλέπει παρά μόνον όσο τού επιτρέπουν οι χαραμάδες της φυλακής του.

Οδυσσέας Ελύτης [Εν λευκώ, 1992]

crazy

Hieronymus Bosch - Creatures in the Garden of Earthly Delights

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Charles Bukowski [1920-1994, German-born American poet, novelist, and short story writer]