And yet, and yet ... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of despera...tion and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!" (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed... to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outv...alues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the ...salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming He burned his house down for the fire insurance... And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfy a lifelong curiosity About our place among the infinities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, ...beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good way to think about television--in fact all the media--is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looki...ng. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on the average) 30 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 30 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening our natural sight, thus ...enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »