"For the Time Being"

[fiefoe]

So glad that this book introduced me to this French paleontologis:

• Another colleague described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners"
• “The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”
• “Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”
• “If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”
• “We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine; and yet at the same time everything is in motion,” Teilhard said.
• his intelligent, plausible, and beautiful The Divine Milieu and the short, magnificent literary essays “The Mass of the World” and “The Heart of Matter.”
• When Los Angeles and Orange Counties dammed their intermittent streams, all the beaches from Los Angeles to Newport Beach lost their sand supply. Those weak hillside streams, which had never even flowed year-round, had supplied all that sand.
• On June 21, (John Muir) recorded a well-defined cloud: “a solitary white mountain … enriched with sunshine and shade.”
• September 8: A few clouds drifted around the peaks “as if looking for work.”
• We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.
• The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps—some humans’ idea of elegance—bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.
• Prince above the firmament, to the level of the Canopy of the Torah, to the rebuilt Temple, to “the storehouses of snow and the storehouses of hail,” and above them to the treasure-houses of blessing and the storehouses of peace.
• C. S. Lewis once noted—interestingly, salvifically—that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it.
• That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.”
• They also see, moments before birth, all the mingled vastness of the universe, and its volumes of time, and its multitudes of peoples trampling the generations under.
• “The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand one hundred miles,”
• Their intricate technique is overshot flaking; it is, according to Douglas Preston, “primarily an intellectual process.” A modern surgeon at Michigan Medical School used such a blade to open a patient’s abdomen; it was smoother, he said, than his best steel scalpels. Another scientist estimated a Solutrean chert blade was one hundred times sharper than a steel scalpel.
• the blade thins from translucency to transparency. You see your skin, and the sky. At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends imperceptibly at an atom.
• the deep misery of idle pleasures.
• The stir, as if of life, impelled each patch of water to pinch and form this same crest. Each crest tumbled upon itself and released a slide of white foam. The foam’s individual bubbles popped and dropped into the general sea while they were still sliding down the dark wave. They trailed away always, and always new waters peaked, broke, foamed, and replenished.
• Ralph Touchett, in The Portrait of a Lady, says, “There’s nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That’s the sensation of life—the sense that we remain.” So I watch from the stern; I attend the wake.
• the exuberant and tumbled beauty of Chagall paintings
• People burst like foam. If you walk a graveyard in the heat of summer, I have read, you can sometimes hear—right through coffins— bloated bellies pop.
• and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?
• It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy, Oxford writer David Bodanis says, because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them.
• The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they stooped in their rooms, so they heightened their doors and roofs for another round.