Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Monday, February 22, 2010

"The pale blue dot"

"[A] mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."

Such an amazing video. Carl Sagan was a wise man. A demonstration of our insignificance in time and space could scare the weak into passivity and fatalism and despair at the pointlessness of it all; it takes courage and wisdom to generate a moral vision of compassion and connectedness from that insight.

(h/t: sszz)
Posted by at 1:58 AM
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

About Me

My photo
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”