brown mud water
“There were Saturday mornings when a muddy brown pool was joyous to the test of squatting kids . . . as dewy and mornlike as brown mud water can get,‘with its reflected brown taffy clouds’”
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.
a red neoned candy store
“There was an alley downtown among the soft redbrick of Keith’s Theater and the Bridge Street Warehouse, with a red neoned candy store of antique Saturday nights of funnies still smeling of ink and strawberry ice cream sodas all pink and frothy with a dew on top . . .”
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.
the rattling red livingroom
“. . . not long after that I dreamed the horrible dream of the rattling red livingroom, newly painted a strange 1929 varnish red and I saw it in the dream all dancing and rattling like skeletons because my brother Gerard haunted them and dreamed I woke up screaming by the phonograph machine in the adjoining room with its Masters Voice curves in the brown wood— Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe.”
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.
glowing pearls
“I send you a box
Of glowing pearls.
Wear them with irises
And orange blossoms.”
—Yakamochi, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
the white dew
“In a gust of wind the white dew
On the Autumn grass
Scatters like a broken necklace.”
—Bunya No Asayasu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
The gazing eye
“As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.”
—The Poetess Ono No Komachi, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
flat bats
“Every Tuesday a man comes and gets me out of social studies and we go to a room and talk about it all.
Last week he spread out pictures of flat bats for me to comment on. I mostly saw flat bats. Then I saw big holes a body could fall right into. Big black deep holes through the table and the floor. And then he took off his glasses and screwed his face up to mine and tells me I’m scared.
I used to be but I am not now is what I told him. I might get a little nervous but I am never scared.”
—Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster, 1987.
a lazy guy
“[Ren] Descartes never got up before noon . . . and it earned him the reputation of being lazy. Still, he managed to revolutionize the fields of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Not bad for a lazy guy.”
—Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman’s Rainbow, 2003.
the salient feature of the rainbow
“‘Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?’ I asked.
‘It was Descartes,’ [Richard Feynman] said. After a moment he looked me in the eye.
‘And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes? mathematical analysis?’ he asked.
‘Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer.’
‘And?’
‘I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation.’
‘You’re overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon,’ he said.
‘Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?’
‘I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful.’”
—Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman’s Rainbow, 2003.
our ability to imagine
“There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”
—Stephen Spender; quoted in Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow, 2003.