In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with a muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead,
Scribbling on the sky the message `He Is Dead',
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-W.H. Auden
Sea Violet
The white violet
is scented on its stalk,
the sea-violet
fragile as agate,
lies fronting all the wind
among the torn shells
on the sand-bank.
The greater blue violets
flutter on the hill,
but who would change for these
who would change for these
one root of the white sort?
Violet
your grasp is frail
on the edge of the sand-hill,
but you catch the light –
frost, a star edges with its fire.
-H.D.
Ham, the conquistador of outer space, was captured in Africa.
He became the first chimpanzee to travel far beyond the world, the first chimponaut. They put him in the space capsule _Mercury_, hooked him up with more wires than a telephone switchboard, and blasted him off.
He came back safe and sound, and the record of his bodily functions demonstrated that humans too could survive a voyage into space.
Ham was on the cover of _Life_.
And he spent the rest of his own caged in a zoo.
-Mirrors, Eduardo Galeano
"It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over."
-Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O'Hara
"Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?"
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
