Currently reading: Number 9 dream by David Mitchell 📚

Picture a wave in the ocean.

You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through, and it’s there, and you can see it, you know what it is.

It’s a wave.

And then it crashes on the shore and it’s gone.

But the water is still there.

The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while.

That’s one conception of death for a Buddhist.

The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from, and where it’s supposed to be.

• Chidi, The Good Place 💬

Rain hisses like swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi’s throat. The belly craves food, she thinks, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories. It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable, stories in all their forms: the gifts’ letters, tittle-tattle, recollections, and tall tales like Hatsune’s singing skull. She thinks of myths of gods, of Izanami and Izanagi, of Buddha and Jesus, and perhaps the Goddess of Mount Shiranui, and wonders whether the same principle is not at work. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

• from The Ten Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell 📚 💬

All creatures of our God and King Lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia! Alleluia! Thou burning sun with golden beam, Thou silver moon with softer gleam! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

Thou rushing wind that art so strong Ye clouds that sail in Heaven along, O praise Him! Alleluia! Thou rising moon, in praise rejoice, Ye lights of evening, find a voice! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

Thou flowing water, pure and clear, Make music for thy Lord to hear, O praise Him! Alleluia! Thou fire so masterful and bright, That givest man both warmth and light. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

Dear mother earth, who day by day Unfoldest blessings on our way, O praise Him! Alleluia! The flowers and fruits that in thee grow, Let them His glory also show. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

And all ye men of tender heart, Forgiving others, take your part, O sing ye! Alleluia! Ye who long pain and sorrow bear, Praise God and on Him cast your care! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

And thou most kind and gentle Death, Waiting to hush our latest breath, O praise Him! Alleluia! Thou leadest home the child of God, And Christ our Lord the way hath trod. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

Let all things their Creator bless, And worship Him in humbleness, O praise Him! Alleluia! Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son, And praise the Spirit, Three in One! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

• by St. Francis of Assisi 📚 💬

I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon – the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

• From The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges 📚 💬

Holy Hill

“In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Excerpt From Slowness by Milan Kundera 📚 💬

Once there were brook trout in the streams of the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy 📚 💬

The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy 📚 💬

Be with those who help your being. Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath comes cold out of their mouths. Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.

• Rumi 📚 💬

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty five stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large, and populous with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as their own, the two stories seemed one. The house could be found. In spring the basement lights went out, and one in the music room.

People in motion; stories starting in a dream, and spoken by unwise actors into wanting ears, then ceasing; the story turning back to dream, and then haunting the day, told and retold. People knew there was a house made of time, and many set out to find it.

• from Little, Big by John Crowley 📚 💬

Currently reading: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne 📚

Currently reading: The Art of Communicating by Thich Nhat Hanh 📚

Finished reading: The Blue Fox by Sjón 📚

George Brown School of Engineering at Rice University

Finished reading: Queen of Angels by Greg Bear 📚

A great tree on the Rice campus today

Currently reading: Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton 📚

Currently reading: Queen of Angels by Greg Bear 📚

Finished reading: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi 📚