Borromini, Palazzo Spada Gallery, 1652
Francesco Borromini, born on this day in 1599.
A forest of things.
September 18, 1994All summer long I almost never see a clear sky that lasts the whole night through. That's because I live in the fog belt. My natural perversity has drawn me to an interest in astronomy, and I have a small telescope which I set up in the back yard on clear nights. No sooner is it set up than in rolls the fog and I go back indoors and read instead.But when Fall comes, and late Winter, then I get my fill of clear skies. Looking through a telescope, even a small one, is to travel through time. You see light that left its natal star years, thousands of years, millions of years ago. When you look at the stars, you're really looking into the past.If you could get a powerful enough telescope, you could watch lives being led millennia since. For you, it would be in the now, but for those who led those lives, they would have ended so long ago that there remains nothing of them whatever, except in this ancient light that streams across our heavens.Perhaps in the vast future a sky-gazer on another planet far away will watch the light that left us when we were young, and we will live again through our shadows, though our corporeal selves have been dust so long that no memory of us remains but a flickering light that glances through an alien planet's fogless Autumn sky.Celestial navigation, used by ships at sea and aircraft, is based on the apparent and relative positions of celestial bodies.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. It'll teach you to keep your mouth shut.
In working to master this fourth step, I’ve tried to teach myself to be patient and to truly allow the flavors to play out—the finish, I’ve found, is a hugely important part of tasting that many people, rushing through their eating, are likely to miss.
The vocation of the artist, the soldier and the statesman are accessible only to those who can honor and hunger after honor, who, drawn backward into the past and forward into posterity, disjoint themselves from our flat present and its imperatives to egalitarian political correctness or “aesthetic” harmlessness. Perhaps we would be better off without such human types. Certainly we may not want to become them ourselves. It may be too that we ought to speak candidly about them and what their fulfillment requires only in private, and in public to let them assume such guises as, for example, the gentlemanly, avuncular Southerner with a gift for stories about old times—entertaining, interesting tales that can go unnoticed as incitations to honor the teller and those about whom they are told.