XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics
Bradley K. Sherman wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:
| Abou Ben Adhem
|
| Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
| Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
| And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
| Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
| An angel writing in a book of gold:--
| Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
| And to the presence in the room he said,
| "What writest thou?"--The vision raised its head,
| And with a look made of all sweet accord,
| Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
| "And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
| Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
| But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
| Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
|
| The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
| It came again with a great wakening light,
| And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
| And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Due to alphabetical order!
(I recall Isaac Asimov relating that story and reason in his autobiography.)
--
"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one
is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.
What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak
of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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