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“...every once in while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.”
Maria Popova, Figuring
There are trillions upon trillions of
Stars in our universe,
Give or take, and
Millions upon millions of
Published books.
I used to wonder
How has the world has not fallen off its axis
With the weight of all the books
We have written?
How do we choose
Between the great volumes
Of words and pages and titles and texts
Which ones to read?
Choice, luck, happenstance?
One day at
Thirteen
My voracious bookworm self
Desired to read a good chunky book
I browsed the shelves
Of my school library
And came across
Sophie’s World
By Jostein Gaarder
A crash course in the history of
Western Philosophy
I remember walking the perimeter of the playground
Where we went camping
While reading it
It led to The Solitaire Mystery and Maya
A new way of seeing the world
Is it a coincidence that I would one day
Marry a philosopher?
One day when
I was seventeen or eighteen
Thumbing through the Sydney Morning Herald
A section called
“Can You Judge A Book (By Its First Page)”
(Or something of the like)
The first page of a book
Followed by a review
“Wooooooo-
hoooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.”
Ali Smith’s Hotel World
I would sporadically check the shelves in Dymocks
Fiction: Smi-
To see what else she had written
It made me want to write
My first published story was an imitation of its style
It led me to The Accidental and Like, and
Seventeen years later
Ali Smith is still writing and publishing and
I’m still reading every word
I don’t recall when I first came across Brain Pickings
Written/curated/nurtured
By the extraordinary Maria Popova
I think I was still in Sydney?
Or perhaps it was London?
The perils of the internet
Memory is different now
But at thirty-four
I read an excerpt of Popova’s Figuring
And knew it was another sparkling luminescence
I borrowed it from the library
And quickly realized I needed my own copy
It’s a brick of a book
I’ve lugged it around Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jersey
And even took it into the woods
The inter-weaving of science and art and literature and poetry
The stories of extraordinary women
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell, George Sand, Rachel Carson
The role of the artist/scientist/author
To connect the dots
To illuminate
To shine
To help us figure out who we are.
Stars in our universe,
Give or take, and
Millions upon millions of
Published books.
I used to wonder
How has the world has not fallen off its axis
With the weight of all the books
We have written?
How do we choose
Between the great volumes
Of words and pages and titles and texts
Which ones to read?
Choice, luck, happenstance?
One day at
Thirteen
My voracious bookworm self
Desired to read a good chunky book
I browsed the shelves
Of my school library
And came across
Sophie’s World
By Jostein Gaarder
A crash course in the history of
Western Philosophy
I remember walking the perimeter of the playground
Where we went camping
While reading it
It led to The Solitaire Mystery and Maya
A new way of seeing the world
Is it a coincidence that I would one day
Marry a philosopher?
One day when
I was seventeen or eighteen
Thumbing through the Sydney Morning Herald
A section called
“Can You Judge A Book (By Its First Page)”
(Or something of the like)
The first page of a book
Followed by a review
“Wooooooo-
hoooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.”
Ali Smith’s Hotel World
I would sporadically check the shelves in Dymocks
Fiction: Smi-
To see what else she had written
It made me want to write
My first published story was an imitation of its style
It led me to The Accidental and Like, and
Seventeen years later
Ali Smith is still writing and publishing and
I’m still reading every word
I don’t recall when I first came across Brain Pickings
Written/curated/nurtured
By the extraordinary Maria Popova
I think I was still in Sydney?
Or perhaps it was London?
The perils of the internet
Memory is different now
But at thirty-four
I read an excerpt of Popova’s Figuring
And knew it was another sparkling luminescence
I borrowed it from the library
And quickly realized I needed my own copy
It’s a brick of a book
I’ve lugged it around Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jersey
And even took it into the woods
The inter-weaving of science and art and literature and poetry
The stories of extraordinary women
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell, George Sand, Rachel Carson
The role of the artist/scientist/author
To connect the dots
To illuminate
To shine
To help us figure out who we are.
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