We are Here and this is Now. After that, everything turns toward guesswork.
– Philosopher Didactilus (Small Gods, Terry Pratchett)
(Made me smile.)
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Category: dancing in the field of dreams
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Attributed to Wynton Marsalis in A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore:
Jazz was a zen art. Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting. Like haiku. Like archery. Jazz wasn’t something you planned. It was something you did. In jazz, every moment is a crisis and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis. It’s all right there. No future. No past. Just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.
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Page 9.
And this is the room where the past pours into the future via the pinch of the now.Timers line the walls. Not hour-glasses, although they have the same shape. Not egg-timers, such as you might buy as a souvenir attached to a small board with the name of the holiday resort of your choice jauntily inscribed on it by someone with the same sense of style as a jelly doughnut.
It’s not even sand in there. It’s seconds, endlessly humming the maybe into the was.
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from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:
How to Build a Universe
No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small. A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom which is itself, f course, an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on a printed “i” can hold something in the region of 500 billion of them. Rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So, protons are exceedingly microscopic to say the very least. Now, imagine if you can, and of course you can’t, shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small it could make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter.
Excellent.
You are ready to start a Universe.
I’m assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary Universe. If you prefer to build a more old fashioned, standard Big Bang Universe, you’ll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is, every last mote and particle of matter between Here and the Edge of Creation, squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a Singularity.
In either case, get ready for a really big bang.
Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no Where. When the Universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.
It is natural, but wrong, to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot, hanging in a dark, boundless Void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has noaround around it. The is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there, whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
And so from Nothing our Universe begins.
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So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking.
So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter, the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier.
Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me.
And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.”
And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.”
So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.
I am the Audience 