Don’t worry about tomorrow; who knows what will befall you today?
–Yiddish folk saying
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
–Isaac Asimov
You’re at that age when everything Mother Nature gave you, Father Time is taking away.
–Milton Berle
There is an art, or rather a knack, to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it’s the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t.
You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, Chpt 9, by Douglas Adams
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.
She succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.
And when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away.
Besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to.
Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)
for a clever animation -> Alice and the Flamingo
Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.
Nothing exists in itself.
If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
But if the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.
For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.
For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.
Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
Chapter 11, Nightgown – Moby Dick by Herman Melville
* Thank you Will Henry for Wallace-the-Brave
“Stay back there now!” he croaked. “Just keep your distance, sport. I’ve got nothing you’re after – unless it’s the cheese, and you can have that. If it’s meat you want, I’m nothing but gristle, but I’ll fight to keep it. Back now! back!”
“I’m not a sport, good simpleton,” said Brother Francis, using the polite address. He tossed back his hood to show his monastic haircut and held up his rosary beads. “Do you understand these?”
After a brief scrutiny, the pilgrim straightened. “Oh – one of them.” He leaned on his staff and scowled.
– A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
Playing with Humor: When sobering events threaten to put you into a dour mood, don’t let your guard down; try to be funny (TF).
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
Mark Weiser
