Hoping for Higher Resolution

Dennis Robertson, Dutch Harbor, Alaska, via Leif Knutsen who hosts this website. If I get a better picture, I'll post it. In the meanwhile, this is a stunning, visceral photo that makes me feel like I am just a few waves away from this incredible, enormous whale.

RPauli sent me this link, which is related to the Sylvia Plath poem in the post immediately prior to this one.

http://thinkingmeat.com/newsblog/?cat=13

A quote from Gale Christianson’s biography of Edwin Hubble captures this ambivalence:

[After Hubble died] Edith Sitwellrecalled that … he showed her plates of “universes in the heavens” millions of light-years away. “How terrifying!” she had remarked. “Only at first,” he replied. “When you are not used to them. Afterwards, they give one comfort. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about–nothing at all!”

(From Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Gale Christianson, 1995.)

I am so grateful to RPauli, for helping me to grapple with the deeply and profoundly frightening prospects of our final end. After all the useless accoutrements I once assumed without reflection were essential, and since learned were implicitly of no import, he has helped me to accept my own insignificance.