Because Alexander Solzhenitsyn is going to provide me reading material this weekend

A bicycle, a wheel, once rolling retains its balance only so long as it moves. Without movement, it collapses. In the same way, the game between woman and man, once begun, can exist so long as it develops. If today didn’t continue yesterday’s progress, the game would no longer exist. - Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn.

Someone else can explain that to me. I just happened to open to chapter eighteen and see it. I think it has something to do with someone named Olga.

Since fellows named Stanislaw do not receive adequate media coverage these days

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
– Stanislaw Lem, “Cyberiad”

Errette finally posted pictures from the Berlin trip. He promised that he’d email me some others that were more pertinent to me actually being in Berlin, but el zorro went to Barcelona to pay a surprise visit to his girlfriend and he hasn’t returned yet. In case, you don’t speak Spanish, allow me to interpret the caption of berlin017: Ladies and gentleman, allow me to present to you the eigth wonder of the world, which is nothing more and nothing less than… a handsome giant made of stone (granite?)…

One can see how my muscle tone might be confused with granite. And you thought he was talking about that bowl we were standing in front of.

On Various Sights

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said–”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

I took a walk in Metz’s colossal cemetary on Sunday. There are thousands upon thousands of decrepit memorials and crypts jutting at awkward angles from the sunken ground. Someone’s guardian angel had fallen and shattered, cracking the beautiful granite slab that kept their bones down in the ground. The angels wings had broken off, and they lay as they had fallen, but someone had taken the severed head and set it so that it looked at me. Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher.

The day before, I visited the Coeur d’Or, Metz’s history museum. In one room lay the remains of some Merovingians staring at me from beneath glass plates in the floor. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. Their teeth were a brilliant enameled white. Skulls grinning at some joke I’ll never get.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

–William Blake