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EVERYWHERE BUT HERE OR THERE
It is odd, when you stop and think about it, that our sense of place is dictated by places other then here. For centuries we were the center of the universe, and all celestial bodies moved around us — without us, no movement, but if t here were no suns, moons, planets or stars to…
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A CLIO MOMENT
Each morning I should take a moment and seriously question whether I have any history or should want any. Each day I know in that moment that I have the option of being reborn, of being someone who never existed before, and the price of this is shedding all of my former selves, an erasure…
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FOR THE BIRDS
It is incredibly frustrating that no matter how long I spend in discussion with the egret, he will tell me nothing of his life, of what it is like to be able to perch on long legs, and then take glorious flight. The limpkin will speak endlessly on this topic, but he really has nothing…
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STATUE
“You have to go all the way to Washington,” he said, “to find decent statuary.” “Oh, you can find one or two in almost every city. Its founder, some general or admiral, some animal that oddly represents a metropolis that has cast out its animals, or penned them up in zoos, put them on leashes.…
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ALTERNATE HISTORY
My mother wanted to tell me of my great-grandmother, a woman she barely knew, but who she imagined more fully that life itself would ever have allowed. History, in her hands was malleable, you could shape it in ways never happened. She wanted to tell me but she knew that her grandmother wouldn’t approve of…
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COSMOLOGY
Our purpose is to understand and then explain the order of the Universe: the logic of the neat array of stars from our centrally located observation deck, the galaxies as so many fractals seeking to hide their organization. We have no ability to control and lack the mechanisms to make all but the most minute…
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NOT HERE
Between now and eventually lies all of history. We are unable to see it though it lies in our field of vision. That’s the problem, we only know how to look backward. We are barely able to see where we are. It isn’t that we don’t want to be here, merely that here is difficult…
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SLIP SLIDING AWAY
There comes a moment at which both memory and history become blurred at the edges, where the bedrock on which belief has been so carefully erected seems more magma, shifting threatening to bring down the superstructure of desire and assumption. It is the fading that is at once both fear inducing and exhilarating for faith…
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HISTORY
I took yesterday and pressed it between the pages of my unabridged dictionary. The day began at sunrise and ended just before it became a supplicant, though to what, was not at all apparent. Days can be frustrating when they refuse to allow sufficient margins. I always thought Thursday’s among the best behaved, or at…
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HOLOCAUST
Years later on, having walked calmly away from my former faith, I am left still pondering where you find the words to describe, to teach the unspeakable, and how you use them to reach children who have no right to know the unspeakable, but who must, lest they later speak it. It was a generation…
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an old writer and his words 