“Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.”
-Matt Haig, The Humans
M60-UCD1 black hole, via NASA
Seriously, how cool is that?
I love coming across things like this. I think if the internet would have existed when I was a kid, I would have been easily sucked in to it, but mostly for learning purposes. It’s like a nearly boundless encyclopedia. I absolutely loved my set of encyclopedias. Didn’t almost every family have one back in the 60s and 70s? I do believe I read the entire set, along with the whole dictionary, and the local phone book once I got really desperate for reading material. I would read every catalog and magazine that came into the house. I would read my dad’s Fur, Fish & Game magazine, my brother’s Ray Bradbury, and my sister’s Stephen King books. By the time I was in the second grade, I could read on the level of a high school senior,and had the vocabulary to match. The funny thing was, I didn’t know how to pronounce many of those words, because I’d never heard them said aloud, I’d only read them.
One of the books I’m reading now is Borges: Selected Poems. I liked this line, and it struck me how it fits in with my thoughts lately of darkness and light. It must be the Scandinavian in me that makes me so pensive around the winter solstice. After all, we say “God Jul” (which loosely translates to Good Yule) instead of Merry Christmas. I, for one, am very ready for the return of the light!
“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”
-Jorge Luis Borges
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