But should you be tempted to purchase in advance a ticket-to-ride on Musk’s escapist enterprise, you might want to consider these facts first. Mars’s atmosphere has next to no oxygen, the planet’s average temperature is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and its distance from Earth is 133 million miles. Best not to get locked out of your doomsday bunker there, nor expect a frontier scout or an underpaid but dedicated EMT to arrive from afar to save your day.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Photo from a friend in Hallowell. That’s the highest level in 25 years. The flood standard for the Kennebec River is 35,000 cubic feet per second. Today in Sidney, my hometown 15 minutes north of here, the flow was 144,000 cubic feet per second.
“We seem only happy enough to be partners in the abolition of the body.” — This is one of the scariest things I have ever read. And combined with this, I feel unequivocally like this.
Mary Oliver:
The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-strung heart.
The “comforts” of home.
Rangifer Canis familiaris
Christian Wiman:
I want to write a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be.
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