book-flipping : the mayor of casterbridge

All was over at last, even her regrets for having misunderstood him on his last visit, for not having searched him out sooner, though these were deep and sharp for a good while. From this time forward Elizabeth-Jane found herself in a latitude of calm weather, kindly and grateful in itself, and doubly so after the Capharnaum in which some of her preceding years had been spent. As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider interests curiously embraced.

Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself, insomuch that she thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world. Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the common phrase, afforded much to be thankful for. That she was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honour of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some halfway point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

.THOMAS HARDY - reflections by Elizabeth-Jane, daughter of the mayor of casterbridge

book-flipping : contact

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle – another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modes talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.
The circle had closed.
She found what she had been searching for.

.CARL SAGAN: Ellie @ Argus Computer Facility, reading the printout.

book-flipping : meaning

He found a great dictionary,
Which had all the meanings.
He unwrapped it
And opened the cover.
All the pages were blank.
Then, as he leaved through,
They started melting into space.
Finally, there remained nothing
But the empty space.
Still, he had time on his hands,
With which he could wade his hands into the space;
But then it was not the end.
So everything started to get squeezed into a point –
A minutest point.
There language a lie.
A point with no time.Everything it.

.ANADHISH PAL - bad dreams good dreams

book-flipping : the time machine

Once cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now – if I may use the phrase – be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.

Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot thing that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know – for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine had been made – thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

But to me the future is still black and blank – is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

.HERBERT GEORGE WELLS - excerpts from Filby's monologues.

book-flipping : thomas hardy stories

Flipping through old books in the evening has continued frequently. This time here are some marked sentences from SELECTED STORIES of THOMAS HARDY.

a] FOR CONSCIENCE SAKE [one of Navin’s favourite, too]: I have learnt that there are some derelictions of duty which cannot be blotted out by tardy accomplishment. Our evil actions do not remain isolated in the past, waiting only to be reversed: like locomotive plants they spread and re-root, till to destroy the original stem has no material effect in killing them. I made a mistake in searching you out; I admit it; whatever the remedy may be in such cases it is not marriage, and the best thing for you and me is that you do not see me more. You had better not seek me, for you will not be likely to find me: you are well provided for, and we may do ourselves more harm than good by meeting again. - F.M.

b] MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL [one of Navin’s favourite, too – from the mayor of casterbridge]:

‘That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
‘& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
‘& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
‘& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
‘& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
‘& that no flour be planted on my grave.
‘& that no man remember me.
‘To this I put my name.
-M.H.

book-flipping : a brief history of time

While having nothing to do in the rainy evening, I started to flip through some old books. Since there was an electrical load-shedding in our area, the library seemed dusty under the flashlight. From amongst the heap, I took out A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, from the big bang to black holes; written by Stephen Hawking. The first time I saw the book was after SLC, when I immediately started to read it; but a pity that I was unable to grasp what the author meant to say. So, page seven was as far as I could get – which was where I had drawn a huge circle with a tag: CONTINUE FROM HERE; and had kept it back on the shelf. However, after some years I managed to complete the book even though I did not fully understand what it was trying to say.

As a habit, I usually mark sentences that I find interesting in a book. This one was no exception, and as I flipped further through its pages today, I encountered a lot of sentences that I had marked with a pencil. Below are a few sentences from random pages throughout the book.

• The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.
  
• The discovery of a complete unified theory may not aid the survival of our species. It may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved for the understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
  
• An event is something that happens at a particular point in space and at a particular time. So one can specify it by four numbers or coordinates.
  
• In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately.
  
• Aristotle believed that all the matter in the universe was made up of four basic elements, earth, air, fire and water. These elements were acted on by two forces: gravity, the tendency for earth and water to sink, and levity, the tendency for air and fire to rise.
  
• According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, “I am trying to think who the third person is.”
  
• The explanation that is usually given as to why we don’t see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics. This says that in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time.
  
• In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of the century, said “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”