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- Thread starter boomerang
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Bob Watson
Paranormal Adept
Finished "the end of the beginning. By Harry turtledove
Sent from my SCH-I435 using Tapatalk
Sent from my SCH-I435 using Tapatalk
I picked up a fantastic first edition hard cover of "The day the tripods came" this week
Which is the prequel to the Tripod trilogy by John Christopher
The Tripods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Which is the prequel to the Tripod trilogy by John Christopher
The Tripods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
I've waded into Robert Caro's definitive biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Years of Lyndon Johnson", volume one, "The Path To Power". Having very much grown up in and lived in LBJ's neck of the woods, I find Caro''s portrayal of Johnson's life and character especially poignant and very much in line with anecdotes I have heard over the years.
PCarr
Paranormal Adept
Is it true he hated the Kennedy brothers?
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
I have much reading to do before reaching that stage of LBJ's career. Caro's book goes into extensive and well documented detail about Johnson's life, and I have just now reached the parts covering his student experience at college in San Marcos, Texas.
However, there is a PBS interview (the Fresh Air series?) of Caro in which he states in no uncertain terms that Johnson loathed the Kennedys--especially Robert. Given Johnson's backwoods frontier roots and his all consuming political ambitions pitted against the Kennedys' east coast cachet and charisma, animosity would seem almost a certainty. I'm looking forward to Caro's continuing narrative.
--------------
Ah--Here's the link. The answer to your question begins at about 31:00.
In 'Passage,' Caro Mines LBJ's Changing Political Roles : NPR
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S
smcder
Guest
Eden and Summa Technologiae
partial translation here:
Summa Technologiae
"Will there arise, maybe in a very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes, such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year fire? It seems to me that this is possible, and don't I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnician to stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance that it might come true, will be possible."
partial translation here:
Summa Technologiae
"Will there arise, maybe in a very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes, such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year fire? It seems to me that this is possible, and don't I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnician to stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance that it might come true, will be possible."
Tyger
Paranormal Adept
@smcder Sounds like the poetry of an Olaf Stapedon, waxing lyrical in 'Last and First Men' - which I read a very long time ago. Impressed me then, so much so that I committed to memory the last lines: "It has been good to have been Man, Grateful for our own courage ...... we shall make, after all, a fair conclusion to this brief music that is Man."
TEXT: "For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our dying world and the frustration of all man's striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave.
"Let his words, not mine, close this story:
"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.
"Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.
"Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.
"But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.
"But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man."
LINK: Last And First Men
TEXT: "For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our dying world and the frustration of all man's striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave.
"Let his words, not mine, close this story:
"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.
"Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.
"Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.
"But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.
"But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man."
LINK: Last And First Men
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Tyger
Paranormal Adept
This is the beginning of Olaf Stapdedon's 'Last and First Men'. These are the words that fired the imaginations of young Science Fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clark and a host of others. I recall these words with all the vividness I reserve for the likes of Ray Bradbury and Marion Zimmer Bradley (her Darkover series).
From the book's Introduction -
TEXT: "This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.
"The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction. Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself, nor expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.
"You cannot believe it. Your acquaintance with time is very imperfect, and so your understanding of it is defeated. But no matter. Do not perplex yourselves about this truth, so difficult to you, so familiar to us of a later aeon. Do but entertain, merely as a fiction, the idea that the thought and will of individuals future to you may intrude, rarely and with difficulty, into the mental processes of some of your contemporaries. Pretend that you believe this, and that the following chronicle is an authentic message from the Last Men. Imagine the consequences of such a belief. Otherwise I cannot give life to the great history which it is my task to tell.
"When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature. I shall not describe any such paradise. Instead, I shall record huge fluctuations of joy and woe, the results of changes not only in man's environment but in his fluid nature. And I must tell how, in my own age, having at last achieved spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind, man is forced by an unexpected crisis to embark on an enterprise both repugnant and desperate.
"I invite you, then, to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of change, grief, hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else occurred, within the girdle of the Milky Way. But first, it is well to contemplate for a few moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical events. For, compressed as it must necessarily be, the narrative that I have to tell may seem to present a sequence of adventures and disasters crowded together, with no intervening peace. But in fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids. Ages of quiescence, often of actual stagnation, filled with the monotonous problems and toils of countless almost identical lives, have been punctuated by rare moments of racial adventure. Nay, even these few seemingly rapid events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They acquire a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative."
LINK: Last And First Men
From the book's Introduction -
TEXT: "This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.
"The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction. Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself, nor expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.
"You cannot believe it. Your acquaintance with time is very imperfect, and so your understanding of it is defeated. But no matter. Do not perplex yourselves about this truth, so difficult to you, so familiar to us of a later aeon. Do but entertain, merely as a fiction, the idea that the thought and will of individuals future to you may intrude, rarely and with difficulty, into the mental processes of some of your contemporaries. Pretend that you believe this, and that the following chronicle is an authentic message from the Last Men. Imagine the consequences of such a belief. Otherwise I cannot give life to the great history which it is my task to tell.
"When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature. I shall not describe any such paradise. Instead, I shall record huge fluctuations of joy and woe, the results of changes not only in man's environment but in his fluid nature. And I must tell how, in my own age, having at last achieved spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind, man is forced by an unexpected crisis to embark on an enterprise both repugnant and desperate.
"I invite you, then, to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of change, grief, hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else occurred, within the girdle of the Milky Way. But first, it is well to contemplate for a few moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical events. For, compressed as it must necessarily be, the narrative that I have to tell may seem to present a sequence of adventures and disasters crowded together, with no intervening peace. But in fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids. Ages of quiescence, often of actual stagnation, filled with the monotonous problems and toils of countless almost identical lives, have been punctuated by rare moments of racial adventure. Nay, even these few seemingly rapid events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They acquire a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative."
LINK: Last And First Men
S
smcder
Guest
Ray
Ray Bradbury came up today in conversation - he is a favorite, I read him every Fall and Spring (at a minimum) and always have a book of his stories by my bedside. Different stories usually - for Fall and Spring, he is so good at evoking a mood and imagery.
Ray Bradbury came up today in conversation - he is a favorite, I read him every Fall and Spring (at a minimum) and always have a book of his stories by my bedside. Different stories usually - for Fall and Spring, he is so good at evoking a mood and imagery.
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
The 1969 film version of Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" still gives me a light but delightful case of the creeps. Talk about evoking mood and imagery.
kanakaris
Paranormal Adept
Home | Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
Good book , but not complete and wrong conclusion
Good book , but not complete and wrong conclusion
Tyger
Paranormal Adept
What was the conclusion?
Tyger
Paranormal Adept
Who would have thought that such ornate tattooing would be a norm now? At least in the US tattooing has become a body-art that is very prevalent. I don't understand it. Perfectly smooth and beautiful skin gets all marked up. When I was growing up old sailors would have them and there was not one of them who didn't say they regretted them as they got older and wished they could have gotten them removed. I guess the tattoo doesn't age well on the skin, for one thing.
Anyway, not my thing - and I recall well how when Rod Steiger revealed his tattooed body it seemed - like the character screams - freakish.
kanakaris
Paranormal Adept
They died by infrasound caused by mini tornadoes.
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
It's something this old man is trying to understand from a socio-psychological point of view. My parents generation was probably at least as puzzled by my generation's eccentric values. But those were not fixed in indelible ink.
S
smcder
Guest
I have a single tattoo - on my chest, fair size but only a small part shows even with a tank top. A full t or any ordinary shirt covers it. I've had it almost twenty years and the image is still clear. If it were to fade I 'd probably have it "refreshed". I chose carefully and it's just always been part of my appearance.
I've thought a few times about another one - but I didn't think it would have the same meaning and it was becoming much more commonplace to have multiple tattoos in visible locations ...
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boomerang
Paranormal Adept
I'm not judging anyone who goes for tats. It's the psychology surrounding what succeeding generations find appealing or not that is interesting. Why, for instance, is my generation--the hedonistic boomers of the 60's-- a kind of Jungian shadow of its predecessor, the WWII and depression era culture of our parents? Certainly, we were materially spoiled by historical standards. But I think it runs deeper than that. Deeper in what way I do not know. But as Jung notes (don't ask me where) one generation's problems have a way of being worked out or played out in successive generations.
Or maybe a cigar is just a cigar here and I'm over analyzing as usual !
S
smcder
Guest
lol - I know you aren't - I marked a particular time in my life with the tattoo and Bradbury's Illustrated Man was an influence - I'm still fascinated with the idea of a mural across my back with turning points and events from my life. I was born in 68 and, at least here in Arkansas - the tattoo craze mostly missed my age group - starting about mid-90s. The shop I went to was the only reputable one in the capital city and it was in a rough neighborhood. The artist locked the door and set a .357 on the counter before he started working on me. Now you find them even in small towns.
I have a few friends with one but none who are covered.