more from "plowing the dark"

about william butler yeats
"...First of all you have to understand that the man was out of his fucking mind. Which is to say Irish. The country doesn't leave you much choice. He more or less had to look for another place to live.
--Mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry?
Yeah, actually... The man never found a place where he could put down and live in good conscience. A place where heart and head could sit at the same table. That was his Byzantium fantasy..."

this quote might be my favourite

"-Why is the math so hard?
--Which math?
-Perspective. Proportion. Depth
--Perspective? Perspective is easy. Just the visual cone turned inside out. Once the Italians got wind of Arab optics, the whole globe was up for grabs.
-Not that perspective, she said, harsh enough to surprise him. But he was alongside her in a flash. The most difficult man she knew was also among the smartest.
--Oh. Perspective. Knowing where you are?
She nodded. He scribbled with a number two pencil on a pad of blank canary legal paper. He drew her diagrams, space's irrefutable proof.
--If being alive were a single problem in long division - how to divide infinity by threescore and ten - we'd have a reasonable chance of solving existence. But the solution for seventy years misses catastrophically for thirty, because teh numerator is infinite. And those solutions, in turn, look nothing like the quotient for this year, this fiscal quarter, or today, let alone the next thirty minutes.
-We live between our next heartbeat and forever
--That's it. we are supposed to solve all the conflicting quotients at once. That is what makes...the math so hard."

that part about living between our next heartbeat and forever...i'd like to try to fit that into our wedding vows maybe...

so i've finished 'plowing the dark'... there's a lot going on in that book, and even though i wasn't thrilled with a couple parts it's still some heavy shit. definitely i recommend it, even if sarah didn't actually read it for class like she was supposed to...