for ever voyaging through strange seas of thought

Writer of science history. Interested in many things. Let's be friends!

[buriedknight]

'You're starting to understand something, aren't you?'

[macrolit]

But beware you be not swallowed up in books: An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

John Wesley (1703-1791) English cleric, Christian theologian and evangelist, founder of Methodism

(via

macrolit

)

[emilymcenroe]

“The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.”

- Eve Babitz, Slow Days Fast Company

[kurganchild]

"In his best poems, MacDiarmid is a lapidary – “one skilled in working with precious stones” – and this stones/words pairing runs through his poems and Ascherson’s book."

Anecdotal Evidence 

[kurganchild]

“The inward gates of a bird are always open. It does not know how to shut them. That is the secret of its song, But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful. I look at these stones and know little about them, But I know their gates are open too, Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be…”

Hugh MacDiarmid, On a Raised Beach 

[kurganchild]

"The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work."

William James, The Laws of Habit

[platycryptus]

a horseshoe crab i saw with the most fantastic flowing mane of algae

(Massachusetts, 7/23/22)

[seatrench]

Coelacanth sp.

(source)

[kurganchild]

"Reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic -- and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration."

Elizabeth Bishop

[thatsbutterbaby]

 David Octavius Hill & Alexander McGlashan - Waller Hugh Paton, Artist, 1828 - 1895.         

[queerspacepunk]

i want to be asked to come over and help put my friend’s kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it’s on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone’s at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people’s houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it’s still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people’s mending by my couch

i want to be surrounded by reminders that ‘imposing’ on each other is what we were born to do

[papierart]

Calx carbonata’ - Specimen of calcium carbonate crystal, here termed ‘crystallized carbonate of lime’, showing optical effects. Plate 35 from British mineralogy: or coloured figures intended to elucidate the mineralogy of Great Britain, by James Sowerby, volume 1 (London, R.Taylor & Co., 1804).

prints.royalsociety.org

[dame-de-pique]

G.L.C. Page - A Foggy Morning, St. Peter’s Cathedral, 1928

[campsis]

Sir James Guthrie Margaret Helen Sowerby (known as Helen Sowerby)

[kurganchild]

The great-great-grandaughter of James Sowerby. Her sisters were writers and illustrators. 

[iconicshrub]

some of that sweet sweet beechey content for yesterday’s One Week of Terror prompt “Ghosts” !