Sunday, November 29, 2020

Whateley and Nina taking their Christmas Letter to Santa

 


We will not be travelling for Christmas but we will be together, healthy and happy for the holidays.

“He saw clearly how plain and simple - how narrow, even - it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Charles Darwin: Notebooks worth millions lost for 20 years

 

 As a Darwin enthusiast and retired librarian I was somewhat appalled when Helen told me the notebooks had been lost/stolen.

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, 
nay whole systems of universe, to be governed
by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be 
created at once by special act"

Charles Darwin, Notebooks


"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

The Origin of the Species

Monday, November 23, 2020

Florence 2019


“The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. 
Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”

The October Country, Ray Bradbury

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Fall drive to Drum

 


"Even the west, beyond the tinged rooftops
smells of cobalt"

from Natural/Unnatural 
by Margaret Avison



Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Florence 2019



"We shall meet again before long to march to new triumphs. "
Giuseppe Garibaldi

Anyone who has followed this blog will know how 
much we enjoyed visiting Italy. We cannot help 
 worrying about all the lovely people we met on our trips.

Italy passes 1m cases

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/nov/11/coronavirus-live-news-governments-scramble-to-secure-vaccine-doses-as-us-infections-top-100000-for-seventh-day-in-a-row?page=with:block-5fac0f598f08cd9e0b7f7426#block-5fac0f598f08cd9e0b7f7426

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Venetian Lagoon 2016



 "Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;"

from September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden












Monday, November 2, 2020

Nov. 2nd 2020, Today



“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in 
their own time, wondering what happened and 
why the world blew up around them.”

from Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury