The universe is saying many things that we cannot yet imagine, let alone understand.

~ü

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

~ Anaïs Nin

[Image: waterscapes]

Modesty and sexuality go hand in hand.  As does repression and ignorance.

~ü

Anathomia ossium corporis humani, the oldest surviving anatomical rendering of the human skeleton.

Apparently this caused an uproar in the science world after nearly eight centuries of repression by religious groups that maintained hegemony throughout the dark ages.

~ lonerwitch

[Image: Hieronymus Brunschwig (1497)]

In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine.  She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.

In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siecle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty.  The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mauler, whose shop I pas every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door.  [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”

Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR.  Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

Inspiration, our most valuable commodity, is invisible and does not reveal its intention immediately.  It must be nurtured.  Unfortunately, I’m afraid that it is too often neglected due to its intangibility.

~ü

[Image: Georges Moreau de Tours Heinrich Heine and the Muse of Poetry (1894)]

The search for an ideal mate is in reality a quest for alienated facets of the self.  We shape an image of our unrealized self and then project it onto another person.

Endless mystery lies just beyond what we can see.

~ü

Weird Spiral Star Discovered —14-Billion-Miles Wide

Two spiral arms emerge from the gas-rich disk around SAO 206462, a young star in the constellation Lupus. This image, acquired by the Subaru Telescope and its HiCIAO instrument, is the first to show spiral arms in a circumstellar disk. The disk itself is some 14 billion miles across, or about twice the size of Pluto’s orbit in our own solar system. 

This recent discovery of a star with spiral arms startled researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. SAO 206462 is more than four hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf. 

Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto. But when they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms.  Astronomers have seen spiral arms before: they’re commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of millions of stars spiral together around a common core.  Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an individual star, however, is unprecedented.

The arms might be a sign that planets are forming within the disk.

Keep reading.

Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie at college