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.
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.
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.
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 hate it when people ask me where I’m from.
I’m from the South. In particular, I’m from NC, TN and SC.
My dad was born in East Tennessee, about an hour from Chattanooga. You’ve heard of Sewannee, THE University of th South? Daddy grew up down the road. And my mother was born in Middle Tennessee, north of Nashville. They met in college and married immediately after my mother graduated. My dad was working his way through and didn’t get through in 3 years.
(There can be some argument about where my lascivious gene comes from. Notice which one was in a hurry.)
I was born in Shelbyville, TN. When I was one, we moved to Durham for my father to go to seminary at Duke, though he chose not to be ordained when he graduated. Instead, he got 2 more Masters and settled on a career in academe. My vacations were always spent with grandparents in TN and I felt like I had dual nationality as a Volunteer and a Tarheel. My father’s search for work that satisfied him had us wandering a bit. We were in Fayetteville for first and second grades (2 different schools for me, though), Southern Pines for 3rd through 5th and then in Cary for 6th while he finished his PhD at State.
When I was about to start junior high school, we moved to Florence, SC. I managed to get back to NC for a year and a half of college in Raleigh, but flunked myself out and was hauled back to the Pee Dee.
I married Jay, telling him I intended to move back to NC. He convinced me to go to Charleston, briefly, while he went to college there and then we’d head north. He didn’t finish the first semester, but it took me 10 years to leave him there and come to NC with his son.
I was in Pinehurst for a year and then moved to Gibsonville when I began working in special Chemistry for LabCorp. It was my third transfer in the company since I had begun working for them in Charleston. Since then I have lived in downtown Burlington, Kimesville and Mebane.
So, I think of myself as a Tarheel with Volunteer roots. And, while Charleston is a beautiful city, I am just not a Palmetto bug.
I am the Audience 