Can you hear us?

 

What is love?

Love is a complex and multifaceted emotion that holds immense significance in human experience. It encompasses a range of feelings and behaviors characterized by:

1. Intimacy: The closeness and emotional connection shared with another person.
2. Passion: Intense longing, attraction, and desire for the other person.
3. Commitment: The decision to maintain the relationship over time.

Here are some key points about love:

• Love involves care, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust.
• It’s not merely an emotion but also an essential physiological drive, akin to hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep or sex.
• Researchers debate whether love is primarily biological or culturally influenced.
• Different types of love exist:
  • Friendship: Based on liking and intimacy.
  • Infatuation: Intense attraction without commitment.
  • Passionate love: Marked by idealization and constant physical closeness.
  • Compassionate/companionate love: Trust, affection, intimacy, and commitment.
  • Unrequited love: Loving someone who doesn’t reciprocate.
  • Twin Flame: A lesser-known form related to soulmates.

In essence, love is a profound force that shapes our lives, relationships, and understanding of the world. 🌟💕

the room - vladimir nabokov

  

the room - vladimir nabokov

The Room
by Vladimir Nabokov

The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories -- the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.

It had a mirror and a chair,
it had a window and a bed,
its ribs let in the darkness where
rain glistened and a shopsign bled.

Not tears, not terror, but a blend
of anonymity and doom,
it seemed, that room, to condescend
to imitate a normal room.

Whenever some automobile
subliminally slit the night,
the walls and ceiling would reveal
a wheeling skeleton of light.

Soon afterwards the room was mine.
A similar striped cageling, I
groped for the lamp and found the line
"Alone, unknown, unloved, I die"

in pencil, just above the bed.
It had a false quotation air.
Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,
or a fat man with thinning hair?

I asked a gentle Negro maid,
I asked a captain and his crew,
I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,
I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.

Perhaps when he had found the switch
he saw the picture on the wall
and cursed the red eruption which
tried to be maples in the fall?

Artistically in the style
of Mr. Churchill at his best,
those maples marched in double file
from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.

Perhaps my text is incomplete.
A poet's death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambment, a melodic fall.

And here a life had come apart
in darkness, and the room had grown
a ghostly thorax, with a heart
unknown, unloved -- but not alone.

The matrix

 

Universe code

 

Protons

 

We might have a God of the gaps, but...

 We might have a God of the gaps, A God who fills up whatever there is in our world that we can not understand! Exactly what this means to fill in gaps with God, does any one have the slightest idea what that might mean? Is God some kind of a variable that you just fill things in with? Is God some kind of secret formula? Some kind of magic spell of some sort or another? What does it even mean for there to be gaps? What does it even mean to fill in the gaps with God? At least it is better than making up a bunch of nonsense and calling that science! At least we don't have a theory of the gaps!

Of Politics & Art by Norman Dubie

  

Of Politics & Art

by Norman Dubie

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.

There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

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Dulce Et Decorum Est

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Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Q. Horatius Flaccus (Horace), Carmina

 statistics

---

Angustam amice pauperiem pati
robustus acri militia puer
condiscat et Parthos ferocis
vexet eques metuendus hasta

vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat
in rebus. illum ex moenibus hosticis
matrona bellantis tyranni
prospiciens et adulta virgo

suspiret “eheu, ne rudis agminum
sponsus lacessat regius asperum
tactu leonem, quem cruenta
per medias rapit ira caedes.”

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidoque tergo.

Virtus, repulsae nescia sordidae,
intaminatis fulget honoribus
nec sumit aut ponit securis
arbitrio popularis aurae.

Virtus, recludens inmeritis mori
caelum, negata temptat iter via
coetusque volgaris et udam
spernit humum fugiente penna.

est et fideli tuta silentio
merces: vetabo, qui Cereris sacrum
volgarit arcanae, sub isdem
sit trabibus fragilemque mecum

solvat phaselon; saepe Diespiter
neglectus incesto addidit integrum,
raro antecedentem scelestum
deseruit pede Poena claudo.

 To suffer hardness with good cheer,

In sternest school of warfare bred,
Our youth should learn; let steed and spear
Make him one day the Parthian's dread;
Cold skies, keen perils, brace his life.
Methinks I see from rampired town
Some battling tyrant's matron wife,
Some maiden, look in terror down,—
“Ah, my dear lord, untrain'd in war!
O tempt not the infuriate mood
Of that fell lion I see! from far
He plunges through a tide of blood!”
What joy, for fatherland to die!
Death's darts e'en flying feet o'ertake,
Nor spare a recreant chivalry,
A back that cowers, or loins that quake.^[2

On Being Asked For A War Poem by William Butler Yeats

  

On Being Asked For A War Poem

by William Butler Yeats

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of medding who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.