"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.

And in short, I was afraid."

 

"I grow old . . . I grow old .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me."

 

TS Eliot

 

White light folded,

sheathed about her, folded.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears,

the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme.

Redeem The time.

Redeem The unread vision

 In the higher dream

While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

 

T.S. Eliot

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

 

....

 

The houses are all gone under the sea.

 

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

 

T.S. Eliot

Ode to COVID :

 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
 

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

 

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
 

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
 

Of death and birth.

 

T.S. Eliot

"All of these focused efforts come only from the deepest mind, and are not artificial. It is a kind of intense sincerity. Without such a deeply straightforward striving mind, it is impossible to attain enlightenment."

 

Seon Master So Hahn

They experience great realization; And their original face appears.

 

Dogen

My heart burns like fire

 

My eyes are as cold as dead ashes

“Even though you have exhausted the abtruse doctrines,

it is like placing a hair in a vast space.

Even though you have learned all the secrets of the world,

it is like a drop of water dripped on the great ocean.”

 

Te-shan Hsüan-chien, 782-865

Some do not understand that we must die,

But those who do settle their quarrels.

 

Siddhartha Gautama

The first three hours of night were almost spent

The time that every stars shines down on us

When have appeared to me so suddenly

That I still shudder at the memory.

 

Joyous love seemed to me, the while he held

My heart within his hands, and in his arms

My lady lay asleep wrapped in a veil.

 

He woke her then and trembling and obedient

She ate that burning heart out of his hand;

Weeping I saw him then depart from me.

 

Dante Alighieri

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
 

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
 

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

 

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering in the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.

 

Remark made by Eugene P. Wigner (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963) at the Richard Couvant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences, University of New York, 1959, as quoted in Wigner, E. P., Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays, Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1979.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

 

Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

 

What is there in a name?

 

Nothing!

 

In times to come no one will remember it.  It will be utterly forgotten.

 

I can hardly remember this name even now!

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

 

Shakespeare Macbeth Act V Scene 5

 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

 

Shakespeare The Tempest Act IV Scene 1

not here; but far away

   The noise of life begins again,

   And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day

 

Tennyson

"The whole world laid before us

 

We just have to grasp it "

 

That was a lifetime ago