INTO SLEEP’s BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. he heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single miniscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still – still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way agove though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

from China Mieville, Kraken

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Resolution

Tell us, they’ll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’s only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

excerpt from Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

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Finished reading: The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets by Thomas R. Cech 📚

4 stars

Finished reading: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves 📚

4 stars. Much more interesting than the comic source material.

Sunlight

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life.

from Haruki Murakami.“Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” 📚 💬

Finished reading: The Allure of the Multiverse by Paul Halpern 📚

Four stars

Our time is up

I think our time is up.

I know. Hold my hand.

Hold your hand?

Yes. I want you to.

All right. Why?

Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

Excerpt from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

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Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much because we were like this one, who years ago was the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her. We were like her. You decide why we were like her and why we were not like her. Why she’s like herself or is not. We’ve been like all things; we left the city during the drug time and speak more now.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak. We’ve been like countless things, we’ve been like all things, we’ve been like the animals over Embassytown in the direction of which I raise my gifting, which is a speaking you’ll come to understand. We didn’t speak, we were mute, we only dropped the stones we mentioned out of our mouths, opened our mouths and had the birds we described fly out, we were vectors, we were the birds eating in mindlessness, we were the girl in darkness, only knowing it when we weren’t anymore.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm, you are suns.

You have never spoken before.

from Embassytown by China Mieville 📚 💬

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – “Will you fade? Will you perish?” – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarely needed that they should answer: we remain.

• from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Sun

My Observations:

Taken: 21 July 2024 at 6:07 PM EST

Equipment: Unistellar Equinox2

General Information:

From our perspective on Earth, the Sun may seem like a constant, unchanging source of light and warmth in the sky. However, the Sun is actually a dynamic and ever-evolving star, continually emitting energy into space. The scientific study of the Sun and its impact on the solar system is known as heliophysics.

As the largest object in our solar system, the Sun boasts a diameter of approximately 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers). Its immense gravity is what binds the solar system together, maintaining the orbits of everything from the largest planets to the tiniest pieces of debris.

Despite being the focal point of our solar system and crucial for our existence, the Sun is merely an average star in terms of size. There are stars that are up to 100 times larger, and many other solar systems host multiple stars. By examining our Sun, scientists gain valuable insights into the functioning of distant stars.

The Sun’s core is its hottest region, with temperatures soaring above 27 million °F (15 million °C). The surface, known as the photosphere, is cooler in comparison, with temperatures around 10,000 °F (5,500 °C). Interestingly, one of the Sun’s great mysteries is its outer atmosphere, the corona, which becomes hotter with distance from the surface. The corona can reach temperatures up to 3.5 million °F (2 million °C), significantly hotter than the photosphere.[^ChatGPT summary of NASA Facts page]

Additional Details from NASA:

The Sun - NASA Science

NASA Image Gallery of Sun:

NASA Image Gallery of Sun

Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.

Excerpt From: Jeff VanderMeer. “Borne.”

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Finished reading: The Laws of Connection by David Robson 📚

Three stars

Finished reading: Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan 📚

Five stars!

Finished reading: Shift by Hugh Howey 📚

Four stars!

Finished reading: Natural Magic by Renée Bergland 📚

3 stars

Finished reading: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers 📚

3 stars

Finished reading: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds 📚

Five stars!

Finished reading: Savor by Thich Nhat Hanh 📚

Five stars.

Finished reading: The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh 📚

Five stars

Finished reading: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall 📚

Four stars