In the quiet sanctuary of the Pencil Pit this morning, warmed by a new heater, my mind wanders back to the contrasting experiences of confinement that I encountered yesterday. The solitude of this barn, my chosen place of reflection, starkly contrasts with the stories of enforced and tragic confinements I absorbed.
An article I read yesterday from The New York Times about the crisis in Gaza lingered in my thoughts. Children like Khaled Joudeh, trapped not only in the physical rubble of a war-torn region but also in a situation far beyond their control or understanding. The image of Khaled, grieving beside his family, encapsulates a confinement of the most harrowing kind – trapped in a cycle of violence and loss, a life dictated by forces outside one’s control.
As I drove to Lowe’s yesterday, the narrative of confinement continued, this time through the podcast recounting Amanda Knox’s ordeal. Her story – one of wrongful accusation and years spent in an Italian jail – is a different kind of confinement. It’s a mental and physical imprisonment, compounded by the weight of injustice and misunderstanding. Knox’s voice, recounting her experiences, was a stark reminder of how freedom, something we often take for granted, can be so fragile.
These stories of confinement, both physical and metaphorical, make me reflect on the nature of freedom. In my barn, the Pencil Pit, I find a liberating solitude, a space where my thoughts and words are free to roam. This freedom, however, is a privilege, one that many, like the children in Gaza or Knox in her cell, are brutally denied.
It leads me to ponder the resilience of the human spirit in the face of such trials. There’s a certain strength, an indomitable will, that both Khaled and Knox exhibit – a refusal to be completely subdued by their circumstances. Yet, the unfairness of their situations, the pain of being confined and constrained by external forces, is deeply troubling.
As I sit here, my thoughts are a mix of gratitude for my own freedom and a deep empathy for those who are unjustly confined. These reflections are not just idle musings; they are a call to awareness and action. They remind me that while some of us have the luxury to build our sanctuaries, others are fighting battles for their basic freedoms.
Today’s mental meandering is a somber journey through the extremes of human experience. It is a recognition of the spaces we occupy – some chosen, some imposed – and the profound impact they have on our lives. In the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the early morning tranquility, I’m reminded that every word I write, every thought I explore, is a testament to the freedom that I have, and a tribute to those who are unjustly deprived of theirs.
In the early hours of dawn, as I sit in the Pencil Pit, my barn transformed into a haven of thought and reflection, I ponder a quote by Nabokov that I stumbled upon: “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” These words, piquant and profound, resonate within the walls of this rustic retreat, where curiosity is not just welcomed but revered.
Yesterday’s experiences seemed to dance around this very theme. My 16-mile bike ride, a ritualistic embrace of nature and endurance, was unusually challenged by rain. Clad in a cheap rainsuit, ostensibly a shield against the elements, I found myself battling not just the external downpour but an internal one too. Drenched in sweat, every pedal stroke became a rebellion against discomfort, against the urge to seek shelter. It was as if the very act of pushing through the rain was an insubordination against the body’s natural inclination for comfort and dryness.
This physical challenge oddly mirrored my mental explorations later in the day, lounging in my bedroom chair, diving deep into Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. The episode titled ‘Beginning Again’ offered a contemplative journey into mindfulness and the power of resetting one’s thoughts. It struck me then how curiosity – the kind that propels us to question, explore, and even defy our comfort zones – is a form of beginning again. Each time we allow our minds to wander into uncharted territories, question ingrained beliefs, or challenge the status quo, we are, in essence, starting anew. We are shedding the old skin of complacency and conformity.
Curiosity, in its relentless pursuit of ‘what if’ and ‘why not,’ is indeed an act of insubordination against the mundane, the accepted, and the unchallenged. It’s a rebellion against the intellectual lethargy that often seeps into our lives unnoticed. Whether it’s questioning the mechanics of a rainsuit during a deluge or contemplating philosophical insights about mindfulness, curiosity propels us into a state of perpetual growth and learning.
In the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the tools of my trade – books, notes, and, of course, pencils – I realize that this space is a physical manifestation of curiosity. It’s where thoughts are not just born but also nurtured and challenged. It’s where the insubordination of curiosity isn’t just an act of defiance but a celebration of the human spirit’s unquenchable thirst for understanding.
As I embark on today’s journey, both in the Pencil Pit and beyond, I carry with me Nabokov’s words as a reminder of the transformative power of curiosity. It is, after all, in the questioning, the exploring, and the rebelling that we truly begin again, continuously redefining ourselves and our understanding of the world around us.
As I sit in the Pencil Pit, the early morning light casting soft shadows around my barn-turned-sanctuary, my mind meanders through the events of yesterday, each a metaphor in its own right, each a lesson subtly veiled.
My thoughts first drift to a casual remark made at the Walgreen’s drive-thru, about Canadian geese that, contrary to their migratory nature, never leave. This offhand comment, punctuated by the distant squawks of the geese, stayed with me. It’s fascinating how, like these geese, certain elements of our psyche – be it fear, resentment, or outdated beliefs – choose to roost permanently in our minds. They linger, often unnoticed, long past their natural season to depart. It’s a gentle reminder of the mental clutter we ought to clear, yet somehow, it remains, nested comfortably in the crevices of our thoughts.
Later, in the attic, amidst the chore of stuffing insulation into the exhaust fan, I was struck by the likeness of the white, blown insulation to clouds. It was a moment of unexpected beauty, a reminder of how perspective can transform the mundane into the extraordinary. It made me think about perception – how the way we choose to see things can alter our entire experience. There, in the dusty corners of the attic, amidst the routine task, lay a whimsical landscape, a sky within a home.
The day ended in the garden with Jon and Donna, our hands working in unison to remove the tomato cages, making way for the planting of Crimson Clover. This act, simple yet profound, is a dance with the rhythm of nature – a preparation for renewal and growth. Planting a winter cover crop is an investment in the future; it’s about nurturing the soil, even when it lies dormant under the cold sky. It symbolizes hope, care, and the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow’s harvest.
These moments, as ordinary as they may seem, are threads in the tapestry of daily life. The geese that don’t migrate remind us to let go of what no longer serves us. The cloud-like insulation speaks of finding wonder in the everyday. The act of preparing the garden soil is a testament to the cycles of nature and life – of preparation, care, and eventual rejuvenation.
In the quiet of the Pencil Pit, as I reflect on these seemingly disparate experiences, I find a common theme – the importance of perspective, the beauty in the ordinary, and the continuous cycle of holding on and letting go. It’s remarkable how life, in its unassuming way, offers lessons at every turn, in every attic corner, every garden patch, and even in the flight patterns of geese.
Sitting in the quietude of the Pencil Pit before dawn, my mind wanders through the vast cosmos, far beyond the confines of this rustic barn. The phrase “everyone loses everything” lingers in my thoughts, now intertwined with the staggering scale of the universe I pondered yesterday.
I watched a video that put the size of our Milky Way Galaxy into perspective. Imagine the entire United States (just the lower 48 states) representing the Milky Way. In this grand scale, our entire solar system is a mere speck around Kansas City, Kansas. It struck me profoundly. On the fingertip of a person, amidst the ridges and valleys of a fingerprint, a tiny yellow ball represented our Sun – smaller than a grain of sand, yet in reality almost 900,000 miles in diameter. The immensity is unfathomable.
Lying in bed last night, I couldn’t shake off the image of our solar system, all seven planets and their orbits, fitting on a man’s fingertip. In this grand cosmic scale, the significance of a single human, or even humanity as a whole, becomes infinitesimally small. We are but a fleeting whisper in the boundless universe, one of billions of galaxies, each with its own billions of stars and planets.
And yet, here I am, in the Pencil Pit, pondering the finite nature of our existence. “Everyone loses everything” – the phrase seems even more poignant against the backdrop of the cosmos. Our time, our possessions, our very beings are transient in this vast universe. But rather than diminishing our lives, this thought imbues them with a profound significance. Each moment we live, each connection we make, every line we write is a miracle against the canvas of this almost endless universe.
This perspective, from the scale of galaxies down to the simple act of writing in my barn, is a humbling reminder of our place in the cosmos. It grounds me in the present, reinforcing the importance of cherishing every fleeting moment. In the grand scheme of things, we may be insignificant, but in the realm of our personal experiences, every moment is vast and meaningful. This is where the true spirituality lies – not in clinging to what we will eventually lose, but in fully embracing the now, the ephemeral beauty of existence in a universe so vast, it’s beyond our full comprehension.
When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether:
“Where did you go, my darling?”
Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.
Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime — this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy — a void beyond being.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.
But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”
And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”
“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.” Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)
I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating Mr g: A Novel About the Creation (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman — a magical-realist serenade to science, coursing with symphonic truth about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our tender, transient lives worth living.
Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all.
“How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?” wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes:
At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.
But then we see that every atom belonging to her — or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her — truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life:
Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.
In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds:
Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.
Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.
And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.
Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more — each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence.
Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves.
If you want to be free, you have to have an understanding of the choices. Conservatives who push book bans and rage against pluralistic education are fighting against their own stated goal.
Imagine you find yourself in a room, facing two doors.
One door is rough, weathered wood. The other is made of boards polished smooth.
There’s carved writing on both, but it’s in a language you don’t read, in characters you’ve never seen. There are chains of intricate symbols inlaid into the frames in gold and silver, but they’re utterly meaningless to you.
There’s just one thing you know. One door is the entry into a golden existence: a long life of peace, ease and good health, full of friends and love. The other opens onto a dark and gloomy road: a hard life of unhappiness, suffering, misery, loneliness, and early death.
Knowing that your fate is riding on the choice, which door would you pick?
The cosmic shell game
The correct answer—assuming you’re a rational skeptic—is that this isn’t a choice at all.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another. You have to have some background knowledge, some way to evaluate which of the options before you is better. If you could read the language carved on the doors, or if you recognized any of the symbols, you might be able to make a better-than-chance judgment about the correct one. Without this knowledge, picking either door would be a blind guess. You might as well flip a coin.
Of course, in real life, we’re in an even worse place than this pared-down hypothetical. In the real world, there are more than just two doors. There are thousands, each one densely covered with their own writing and their own symbols (notwithstanding the evangelists who think there are only two choices: “My Religion” and “Everything Else”). In addition to that, each door is surrounded by a dense crowd of people yelling that their door is the one true way to happiness and all the others are pretenders.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another.
Longtime readers may remember this as the scenario in my essay “The Cosmic Shell Game“. It’s a potent reason to distrust the truth claims of religious believers. No one can investigate all these options, and very few people even try. Instead, most people choose the faith they belong to because of an accident of birth. Their decision is effectively random, no more trustworthy than flipping a coin.
This argument doesn’t just apply to religions. It works equally well as a metaphor for philosophies, nationalities, political ideologies, and every other major life decision where making one choice forecloses others. How can anyone make any trustworthy or informed choices about anything, when the space of possibility is so large as to be unnavigable?
The lay of the land
It’s impossible to study every religion, philosophy and ideology in the universe to make a definitive ranking. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying. We’ll never have perfect knowledge, but we can always gain more knowledge. And the more knowledge we have, the better the choices we can make. It’s like trying to hike across uncharted territory. Even if you don’t have a complete map, the more you know about the lay of the land, the better able you are to find a safe path.
This goes for every field of inquiry. The more you know about history, the more you can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The more you know about science, the less likely you are to hold a belief that was already tested and disproven. The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
For best results, this knowledge should be a broad cross-section of humanity, not limited to one gender or one race or one religion or one country. It’s the same reason why diverse groups make better decisions: it’s less likely that everyone has the same blind spots, so one person will see what another overlooks. You can achieve the same effect as an individual by stocking your mind with the widest possible selection of human thought and knowledge.
That’s why pluralism is so important in education. It’s the answer to conservatives who think it’s an underhanded liberal ploy—a way to instill leftist values to the exclusion of all others. Actually, it’s just an acknowledgment of a basic fact of reality: it’s really complicated, and figuring stuff out is hard!
Knowledge sets you free
Conservatives say that freedom is their number one value, the thing they care about above all else. Fair enough. Here’s what I say to that: Freedom is only truly possible for an educated person—and the more education you have, the more free you are.
Anyone can be “free” in the wild-animal sense of pursuing immediate desires without constraint. But the truest, most uniquely human kind of freedom is the ability to make decisions that steer the course of your life. Just as in the two-doors analogy, that kind of freedom is only possible when you have the knowledge to make responsible choices. Otherwise, it’s just random guessing or blindly following the path presented by birth or society.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world.
If you had a kitchen cabinet full of cans, some of which were nutritious and some were poison—but you had no way of knowing which is which—would you boast about your “freedom” to pick any one you felt like? Of course not, because no one values the freedom of ignorance or the freedom to plunge blindly into danger. The only kind of freedom anyone wants is the freedom to choose right—whatever you believe the right choice to be.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world. It’s knowledge that gives you the power to shake off indoctrination, recognize fallacies for what they are, and choose the worldview whose claims are borne out by evidence.
“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The sole purpose of human existence,” Carl Jung wrote in his notebooks, “is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” In a universe devoid of purpose in the human sense, in which we are but a cosmic accident, the darkness of mere being can easily overwhelm us — and yet we go on striking the match of meaning. “However vast the darkness,” Stanley Kubrick urged in a 1968 interview, “we must supply our own light.”
Yalom has done for psychotherapy what Oliver Sacks has done for neurology, using case studies as a storytelling springboard for contemplating some of the largest and most perennial human questions. Through the stories of ten patients, he examines what the four main aspects of psychotherapy — the inevitability of death, the freedom to shape our own lives, our ultimate aloneness, and the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.
The last of the four, which Yalom considers the existential human dilemma of “a being who searches for meaning and certainty in a universe that has neither,” is both the most elusive and the most fertile, for embedded in it are the other three. He writes:
If death is inevitable, if all of our accomplishments, indeed our entire solar system, shall one day lie in ruins, if the world is contingent (that is, everything could as well have been otherwise), if human beings must construct the world and the human design within that world, then what enduring meaning can there be in life? … We are meaning-seeking creatures. Biologically, our nervous systems are organized in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations. Meaning also provides a sense of mastery: feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them. Even more important, meaning gives birth to values and, hence, to a code of behavior: thus the answer to why questions (Why do I live?) supplies an answer to how questions (How do I live?).
Art from a vintage children’s-book adaptation of Voltaire’s philosophical homage to Newton and the human condition. Click image for more.
The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts — not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.
Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from ‘The Well of Being.’ Click image for more.
In both therapy and life, this sidewise gleam of meaning requires cultivating a comfort level with uncertainty and continually asking what Hannah Arendt so memorably termed the “unanswerable questions” that make us human; it then requires that, to paraphrase Rilke’s immortal words, we live those questions. Yalom writes:
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite… The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy.
[…]
I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.
“The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect…”
I’ve found no more lucid and luminous a defense of hope than the one Rebecca Solnit launches in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (public library) — a slim, potent book penned in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq; a book that has grown only more relevant and poignant in the decade since.
Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)
We lose hope, Solnit suggests, because we lose perspective — we lose sight of the “accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes” which constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past, a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation punctuated by occasional tumult.
Each of our lifetimes brims with personal evidence of these collective cultural shifts: At the time I was born, no one imagined that the Cold War would end and a girl raised in communist Bulgaria would make a life for herself reading and writing about books in English while facing the Manhattan skyline; a mere decade ago, it seemed inconceivable that a distributed tribe of strangers would raise a million dollars for refugees in another part of the world via an instantaneous global communication system of 140-character neo-telegrams; just a couple of years ago, it was hard to imagine that the day would come when all of us would be able to marry the people we love.
Solnit writes:
There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice — and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of… We need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.
Imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy center stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on the stage. The limelights there are so bright they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work. A lot of the fate of the world is decided onstage, in the limelight, and the actors there will tell you that no other place matters.
What is onstage is a tragedy, the tragedy of the inequitable distribution of power and of the too-common silence of those who settle for being audience while paying the price of the drama. Traditionally, the audience is supposed to choose the actors, and the actors are quite literally supposed to speak for us. This is the idea behind representative democracy. In practice, various reasons keep many from participating in the choice, other forces — like money — subvert that choice, and onstage too many of the actors find other reasons — lobbyists, self-interest, conformity — to fail to represent their constituents.
Hope, Solnit observes, dies when we choose to watch the unfolding drama in resignation and abdicate all responsibility, pointing a blaming finger at those in the limelight. (Lest we forget, Joseph Brodsky put it best: “A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.”)
She considers the disposition of the hopeless:
They speak as though we should wait for improvement to be handed to us, not as though we might seize it. Perhaps their despair is in some ways simply that they are audience rather than actors.
Our most radiant horizon of hope, Solnit argues, lies in the darkness beyond the limelight:
The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you have not yet heard of who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark, it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows — that we must hope for. For those onstage, we can just hope the curtain comes down soon and the next act is better, that it comes more directly from the populist shadows.
At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
by 
The Pencil-Driven Life 