"The Great Bridge" +
Sep. 21st, 2015 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeEdward Herrmann's voice suits David McCullough's words well. Turns out the second narrator is there to provide a summary of the abridged parts of the audiobook. I should have taken more notes.
"Non-Zero Probabilities"
— by N. K. Jemisin —
"The Glad Hosts"
— by Rebecca Campbell —
__ The flowers, now scentless, their petals nearly grey, are the only things that demonstrate in their substance the passage of time. Other than her face, of course, which despite the no-doubt moisturizing unguents of the pod, shows years of existence, though not years lived. She and the flowers know it.
All Robert Frost threads are an excuse to share my favorite Frost poem:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Thre's this poem by Derek Mahon, "Leaves":
The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.
It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.
Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfilment.
RE: my favorite Frost poem, I've always liked Design:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
- Boss Tweed and his favorite canary.
- Elder Roebling's painful and possibly unnecessary death after an accident.
- the dreadful "caisson sickness"
- Washington R. stayed in command of the bridge buidling despite being bedridden for years, with the help of his wife Emily.
- (Washington:) No man can attain importance without thinking highly of himself, if only to convince others to think highly of him.
- Over it all stood the bridge, triumphant and immovable, seeming to hold the land in place against all change... defying weight and space like some natural phenonemon.
- Emily took the first carriage ride across the bridge, carrying a live rooster signifying victory.
- Washingotn's cranky letter to a trustee: the advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over-balanced by disadvantages of modern civilization.
"Non-Zero Probabilities"
— by N. K. Jemisin —
"The Glad Hosts"
— by Rebecca Campbell —
__ The flowers, now scentless, their petals nearly grey, are the only things that demonstrate in their substance the passage of time. Other than her face, of course, which despite the no-doubt moisturizing unguents of the pod, shows years of existence, though not years lived. She and the flowers know it.
All Robert Frost threads are an excuse to share my favorite Frost poem:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Thre's this poem by Derek Mahon, "Leaves":
The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.
It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.
Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfilment.
RE: my favorite Frost poem, I've always liked Design:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
