TheThingItself - The Monday Morning Memo

“Of each particular thing, ask:
What is it, in and of itself?
What is its causal nature?”
– Marcus Aurelius
Meditations, book 8
Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome
from 161AD to his death in 180.

The Three Goals

    The first goal is to see the thing in itself
    in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
    for what it is.
    No symbolism, please.

    The second goal is to see each individual thing
    as unified, as one, with all the other
    ten thousand things.
    In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

    The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
    to see the universal in the particular,
    simultaneously.
    Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

– David Bubill
Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse
(Copper Canyon Press)

“Friends began arriving with champagne, and the party began. That afternoon I finally reached my mother. I wanted to tell her to stop sending me articles about DNA since I had now won the Nobel Prize for my expertise on that subject. My mother often mailed me articles from Reader’s Digest about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible. She probably hoped that winning the Nobel Prize might enable me to be published some day in Reader’s Digest.”

- Kary Mullis, Dancing in the Mind Field (Pantheon Books, 1998)

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