Void of Inspiration

It is more reliable to judge people by analyzing their abilities than by glancing at the scoreboard. Or as Bernoulli put it, “One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results.”
– Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

“Zeno’s paradox goes like this: Suppose a student wishes to step to the door, which is 1 meter away. (We choose a meter here for convenience, but the same argument holds for a mile or any other measure.) Before she arrives there, she first must arrive at the halfway point. But in order to reach the halfway point, she must first arrive halfway to the halfway point – that is, at the one-quarter-way point. And so on, ad infinitum. In other words, in order to reach her destination, she must travel this sequence of distances: 1/2 meter, 1/4 meter, 1/16 meter, and so on. Zeno argued that because the sequence goes on forever, she has to traverse an infinite number of infinite distances. That, Zeno said, must take an infinite amount of time. Zeno’s conclusion: you can never get anywhere.”
– Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives