A New School Year Begins

Hello everyone –

Since the ancient Egyptian New Year falls on next Tuesday, August 29, what better time could there be to reflect on the rich legacy of science, history, and culture that Egypt has bequeathed to us?  Gerald Massey (1828-1907), a Victorian Egyptologist, penned this tribute to the ancient Egyptians and their colossal achievements.

“Egypt” by Gerald Massey (1882)

Egypt!  How I have dwelt with you in dreams,

So long, so intimately, that it seems

As if you had borne me; though I could not know

It was so many thousand years ago!

And in my gropings darkly underground

The long-lost memory at last is found

Of motherhood – you mother of us all!

And to my fellowmen I must recall

The memory too; that common motherhood

May help to make the common brotherhood.

Egypt!  It lies there in the far-off past,

Opening with depths profound and growths as vast

As the great valley of Yosemite;

The birthplace out of darkness into day;

The shaping matrix of the human mind;

The cradle and the nursery of our kind.

This was the land created from the flood,

The land of Atum, made of the red mud,

Where Num sat in his Teba throned on high,

And saw the deluge once a year go by,

Each brimming with the blessing that it brought,

And by that waterway, in Egypt’s thought,

The gods descended; but they never hurled

The deluge that should desolate the world.

There the vast hewers of the early time

Built, as if that way they would surely climb

The heavens, and left their labors without name –

Colossal as their carelessness of fame –

Sole likeness of themselves – that heavenward

Forever look with statuesque regard,

As if some vision of the eternal grown

Petrific, was forever fixed in stone!

They watched the moon re-orb, the stars go round,

And drew the circle; thought’s primordial bound.

The heavens looked into them with living eyes

To kindle starry thoughts in other skies,

For us reflected in the image-scroll,

That night by night the stars for aye unroll.

The royal heads of language bow them down

To lay in Egypt’s lap each borrowed crown.

The glory of Greece was but the afterglow

Of her forgotten greatness lying low;

Her hieroglyphics buried dark as night,

Or coal deposits filled with future light,

Are mines of meaning; by their light we see

Through many an overshadowing mystery.

The nursing Nile is living Egypt still,

And as her lowlands with its freshness fill,

And heave with double-breasted bounteousness,

So doth the old hidden source of mind yet bless

The nations; secretly she brought to birth,

And Egypt still enriches all the earth.

And here are some back-to-school poems that I recall from my own elementary school days in the 1970s! :)

“Back to School” by Helen H. Moore

Summer's almost gone now,

And on the streets we see

School buses filled with children

Where ice cream trucks should be.

“Fall Is Here” by Helen H. Moore

Fall is here. Another year is coming to an end.

Summer’s finished, summer’s gone, winter’s round the bend.

Fall is piles of crunchy leaves, orange, gold, and red.

Fall is sweaters with long sleeves and blankets on the bed.

Fall is football, fall is pumpkins, fall’s where summer ends;

And fall is coming back to school, and seeing all my friends.

Enjoy your first weekend of the fall semester! :)

Rob

In Tenebris Lux

Hello everyone –

A great deal of unsettling news has been reaching us through the news media over the last few weeks. From around the globe, scenes of chaos and despair haunt our TV screens on a nightly basis. Dealing with these global realities of life in the 21^st century isn’t an easy task, but it is a task that can be accomplished with the aid of historical perspective, mixed with a generous helping of hope and wisdom. This fortnight’s quotations, drawn from various sources, have provided comfort, inspiration, and a greater sense of perspective to me, and now I am sharing them with you.

Reflections from BABYLON 5 (The Best Science-Fiction TV Series of the 1990s!)

By J. Michael Straczynski (Creator/Producer/Writer)

“We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon, and see the line of ancestors behind us, saying, ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us, saying, ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.”

-- Captain John Sheridan in Episode #37

       All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. This had the feeling of both.

       G’Quon wrote, “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities – it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.”

       The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation.

       No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

-- Closing Monologue from Episode #66

“Hope” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune -- without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Some Poetical Wisdom from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

From “Ulysses”:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From “Locksley Hall”:

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

From “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”:

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue,

I have seen her far away--for is not Earth as yet so young?--

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion killed,

Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert tilled,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,

Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul;

Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole.

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.

Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

Follow Light, and do the Right--for Man can half-control his doom--

Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.

Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.

I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.

Until next time,

Rob :)

“Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet how Gilgamesh went through every hardship. He walked through darkness and so glimpsed the light.”

-- The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia, 3rd Millennium BCE)

A Golden Jubilee Potpourri

Hello everyone –

As of tomorrow, I’ll be 100 years younger than the University of Illinois and the Dominion of Canada! :) In honor of this once-in-a-lifetime occasion, I’d like to share with you three of my all-time favorite poems about life, the Universe, and everything. Encapsulated within the rhythm and rhyme of the following verses you will find my philosophy of life and my never-ending wonder at the world around me.

“A Psalm of Life”

(What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist)

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream ! —

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real !   Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal ;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way ;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle !

Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, however pleasant !

Let the dead Past bury its dead !

Act,— act in the living Present !

Heart within, and God overhead !

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o'er life's solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate ;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

“Escape at Bedtime”

By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Excerpted from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)

The lights from the parlor and kitchen shone out

Through the blinds and the windows and bars;

And high overhead and all moving about,

There were thousands of millions of stars.

There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,

Nor of people in church or the Park,

As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,

And that glittered and winked in the dark.

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,

And the star of the sailor, and Mars,

These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall

Would be half full of water and stars.

They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,

And they soon had me packed into bed;

But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,

And the stars going round in my head.

“The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899)

By William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

NOTE: From the Emerald Isle comes this love-quest poem inspired by classical Irish mythology. Yeats’ poem in turn served as the basis of “Rogue Planet,” the 18^th episode of the 1^st season of STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE. And just in case you’re wondering, I like this poem especially because I’ve been pursuing Learning all my life – and the pursuit is the goal. J

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

  

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the Moon,

The golden apples of the Sun.

Happy August to all my friends & followers out there! :)

Rob