A Rolling Out of Maps

Inner Sky

Upon that desolate peak my mind had finally turned inward.  It is from that domain, that inner sky, that I choose to speak—a world of dreams, of light and darkness that we will never escape, even on the far edge of Arcturus.  The inward skies of man will accompany him across any void upon which he ventures and will be with him to the end of time.  There is just one way in which that inward world differs from outer space.  It can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.

Loren Eiseley, “The Inner Galaxy,” in The Star Thrower, 1978, pp. 298-99

Poem

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It saves austere and transparent phrases

From the filthy discord of tortured words.

It says that everything is new under the sun,

Opens the congealed fist of the past.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.

As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,

The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.

Their enemies have delivered themselves to their destruction.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1968

from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

"Love Beauty Joy and Worship"

A frieze on the quadrangle side of Lovett Hall, Rice University, Houston.  I took this picture in the late 1980's the old-fashioned way, with film and a telephoto lens (the frieze is between the first and second floors, rather high on the wall).