Let’s take as an example a simple and common phenomenon in the natural world: the rainbow.1 We can all agree that there is something enchanting about rainbows. Is their magic diminished if I explain to you the science of how they form? The poet Keats claimed that Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.” In my view, far from ‘destroying its poetry,’ science only enhances our appreciation of nature’s beauty. See what you think.
Rainbows combine two ingredients: sunshine and rain. But the science behind the way in which they combine to create the arc of colour we see in the misty sky is as beautiful as the sight itself. Rainbows are made of broken sunlight that reaches our eyes after the Sun’s rays strike a billion raindrops. As the Sun’s rays enter each water droplet, all the different colours of light that make up sunlight slow down slightly to travel at different speeds, bending and separating out from each other in a process called refraction.2 They then bounce off the backs of the droplets, returning to pass through their fronts at different points, refracting a second time as they do so and fanning out into the colours of the rainbow
These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet and for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily I bore the disappointment.
Sayfa 6
I also became poet and for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation.
Sayfa 5Kitabı okudu
Suyun ateşe galebesi gibi, görünüşte sen kadına galip isen de aslında tâlibi olduğun için kadının mağlûbusun.
Bu, insanın hususiyetidir; hayvanlarda muhabbet noksandır ve onların nakıslığını gösterir.
Peygamber buyurdu ki: «Kadınlar, akıllı kişilere, ehl-i dil olanlara galip olurlar.
Fakat cahiller kadına galebe ederler», çünkü onlar sert ve kaba muameleli olurlar.
Sevgi ve acıma insanlık vasfıdır, hiddet ve şehvet hayvanlık.
Kadın Hak nûrudur, sevgili değil, sanki Yaratıcıdır, yaratılmış değil.
Keys to the Character (Rake): At first it may seem strange that a man who is clearly dishonest, disloyal, and has no interest in marriage would have any appeal to a woman. But throughout all of history, and in all cultures, this type has had a fatal effect. What the Rake offers is what society normally does not allow women: an affair of pure
Sayfa 24Kitabı okudu
“For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.”
Sayfa 196Kitabı okudu
There lies a green field between the scholar and the poet; should the scholar cross it he becomes a wise man; should the poet cross it, he becomes a prophet.
Sayfa 39Kitabı okudu
Galaktion Tabidze
In 1928, the Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze wrote of Stalin’s house in Gori, “here is the secret of a little hut, the secret of mankind.” A few lines later, Tabidze wrote scathingly of the house’s inhabitant, “He does not have a real name, his name is Legion”—quoting a famous reference in the Gospels to Satan.
Sayfa 70 - Heinrich böll stiftung&Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
at present in Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903
You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that in unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.
