"

Sometimes you find a song that holds such rare emotion, it makes you remember emotions you thought you’d lost. And then you know you aren’t the only one: someone, somewhere understands. They were just better at putting it into words.

I want to be a victim to my desires. I want to be overwhelmed. I want to be somewhere where I barely exist as a thinking person, and then I want to stay there forever.Then I never want to let go.

"

"A problem, no matter what kind, is an effect produced by the combination of an internal and an external cause. Here is a glass of water. Let’s suppose that there is some sediment at the bottom. If you stir the contents, the water will become dirty. In this case, the sediment is the internal cause and the act of stirring is the external cause. Suppose we have a man and wife who lead a cat-and-dog existence. Each insists that the other is to blame. It’s like saying, “Because you stirred the water, it became dirty.” But no matter how hard you stir, if there is no sediment the water will remain clear. People often fail to notice the sediment and simply accuse others of stirring the water. In other words, they are not aware that the cause of their unhappiness lies within themselves and that they are merely experiencing the effect of that cause after it has been activated by someone else."

"There is no equivalent of the world. That might even be said to be its definition - or lack of it. No equivalent, no double, no representation, no mirror. Any mirror whatsoever would still be a part of the world. There is not enough room for both the world and for its double. So there can be no verifying of the world. This is, indeed, why ‘reality’ is an imposture. Being without possible verification, the world is a fundamental illusion. Whatever can be verified locally, the uncertainty of the world, taken overall, is not open to debate. There is no integral calculus of the universe. A differential calculus, perhaps? ‘The universe, made up of multiple sets, is not itself a set’ (Denis Guedj)."

"

In Answer to Your Question

So you asked, once we had scaled
the highest hill that we could find,
before the most sombre-red
sky we’d ever seen.
A sky that looked as if the death
of a time-distant explosion
was playing out its last ember-glows
up there in its heavens.

You asked,
as you looked out over the loose,
Friday streets of the city,
and watched the overspill of the working week:
the simmering boredom-soak,
released in those staggering beasts.

You asked,
your face as full as I have seen it.
if the place we looked down on,
from our high-vantage, was still the Great
Britain of the history books. The England,
Scotland, Ireland, Wales of conquerors
and queens, and coteries and billowing sails.

I sat in silence for some while.
My mind filled with images
of gun-boats, musket-men,
trade companies and slaveries
that call themselves by other names.

I watched your shivering
retreat into your old-coat –
though the night was not so cold.
All the while, the word ‘yes’
was wet on my tongue.

And though I kissed you,
it seemed that even in that moment
I disagreed with my own impulse:
that a common lust for something
better than there is,
is not enough.

And the wind sang
in the forest behind us. As the wind
that dwells in such places
always has.

And the dust and the bracken
blew across the hillside where we sat,
and for a while we were lost.

"

"Invisible things are the only realities."

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."