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“Always, over and over, I will have to pay for my loved and lovely life with days like these.  Always, over and over, these days and nights will come, the anxiety, the aversion, the doubt.  And I will still live, and I will still love life.”
http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/projects/hesse/works/trees.html
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“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
Siddharta, Hermann Hesse
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
William Beebe, The Bird, 1906
We are Russian dolls, our lives made possible by other lives within us.
The Forest Unseen, David George Haskell
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“A modest fire burns longer. So it is, also, with stars.
The brightest rush through lives of spendthrift extravagance to finally explode in terminal fits of self-expression, briefly outshining whole galaxies. Meanwhile, humbler, quieter suns patiently tend their business, aging slowly, gracefully.
Ironically, it takes both types to make a proper potion. For without the grand immoderation of supernovas there would be no ingredients—no oxygen, carbon, silicon, or iron. And yet the steady yellow suns are also needed—to bake the concoction slowly, gently, or the recipe will spoil.
Take a solar mix of elements. Condense small lumps and accrete them to a midsized globe. Set it just the right distance from the flame and rotate gently. The crust should bubble and then simmer for the first few million years.
Rinse out excess hydrogen under a wash of sunlight.
Pound with comets for one eon, or until a film of liquid forms.
Keep rotating under an even heat for several billion years.
Then wait…”
-- Earth, David Brin
“First came a supernova, dazzling the universe in brief, spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral clouds of new-forged atoms. Swirling eddies spiraled until one of them ignited—a newborn star.
The virgin sun wore whirling skirts of dust and electricity. Gas and rocks and bits of this and that fell into those pleats, gathering in dim lumps… planets…
One tiny worldlet circled at a middle distance.
It had a modest set of properties:
mass—barely enough to draw in a passing asteroid or two;
moons—one, the remnant of a savage collision, but big enough to tug deep tides;
spin—to set winds churning through a fuming atmosphere;
density—a brew that mixed and separated, producing an unpromising surface slag;
temperature—heat was the planet’s only voice, a weak one, swamped by the blaring sun.
Anyway, what can a planet tell the universe, in a reedy cry of infrared? “This exists,” it repeated, over and over. “This is a condensed stone, radiating at about three hundred degrees, insignificant on the scale of stars.
“This speck, a mote, exists.”
A simple statement to an indifferent cosmos—the signature of a rocky world, tainted by salty, smoke-blown puddles.
But then something new stirred in those puddles. It was a triviality—a mere discoloration here and there. But from that moment the voice changed. Subtly, shifting in timbre, still faint and indistinct, it nevertheless seemed now to say,
“I… am…”“
– Earth, David Brin
What beautiful opening lines.
