The Incomparable Milk of Wonder

bohemea:

So much has been written about those few words at the end that Bob whispers into Charlottes’ ear. We can’t hear them. They seem meaningful for both of them. Coppola said she didn’t know. It wasn’t scripted. Advanced sound engineering has been used to produce a fuzzy enhancement. Harry Caul of The Conversation would be proud of it, but it’s entirely irrelevant. Those words weren’t for our ears. Coppola (1) didn’t write the dialog, (2) didn’t intentionally record the dialogue, and (3) was happy to release the movie that way, so we cannot hear. Why must we know? Do we need closure? This isn’t a closure kind of movie. We get all we need in simply knowing they share a moment private to them, and seeing that it contains something true before they part forever.

- Roger Ebert on Lost In Translation

(Source: rogerebert.suntimes.com)

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.

— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

We also recognize that imagination has to struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Poetry must be written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe.

— Adam Zagajewski

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

It was creative desperation because that’s when a man really begins to think hard, and of course it hearkens me back to the creation of The Hulk, which I told you about, and this woman who lifted a car. If you want to do it, you can lift a buildings. I’m not saying you can, and I’m not saying you can’t get a hernia, but I’m not ruling out that you might possibly, if you find the right niche, you might possibly lift that building. Maybe not far. Maybe an inch above the ground. Maybe it’s not a large building, but you can do it. I’ve seen man do everything. I think Man is the kind of animal that is capable of doing anything, whether it’s good or heinous; whether it’s easy or horribly, horribly difficult.

— Jack Kirby

(Pictured: Jack Kirby’s work space, via joekeatinge.tumblr.com)

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me. 

— Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal Woman”