“You are water
I’m water
we’re all water in different containers
that’s why it’s so easy to meet
someday we’ll evaporate together.”
― Yoko Ono
Tag Archives: Texas
Accept the Inferno and Become Part of It
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Held Like A Legend, And Understood
“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Never Do Anything By Halves
Obscurity Is Usually the Refuge Of Incompetence
“It’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don’t even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we ‘fail’ to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything–obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Stabs Us From Behind With the Thought Of Annihilation
“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows — a colorless, all- color of atheism from which we shrink?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Having No Goal
“When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Depth Of Field
“Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
The Past Increases, The Future Recedes
What is the plural of ‘Pegasus?’
What is the plural of ‘Pegasus?’
Mark A. Mandel, linguist (i.e., language scientist and researcher), PhD in linguistics
The original was Greek, but we adopted it in English in the Latin form, ending in -us, not the Greek -os. So we use “pegasi”, not “*pegasoi”. We can and do also use “pegasuses”, as we say “campuses” and “calluses”: Eunji Choi is right about expressions like “the Mickey Mouses of the world”, but that’s not relevant here: “pegasus”, like “atlas” and “medusa”, is proper only in origin.











