But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
Friday, December 16, 2022
I remember being obsessed by the photo from the ballon's perspective of Joseph Kittinger sky-diving from about 20 miles up, when I was in my teens (reminded of it because he just died). He needed oxygen and an insulated suit to fall from that high up; he was in free fall for something like five minutes -- not as long as Mulciber in Homer or Paradise Lost (the relevant passage of which we read a few years later when I was a junior in high school)* but a very long time. ---- * from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th' Ægean Ile. (I. 742-46)
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