Monthly Archives: February 2014
Don’t Hate Math
I didn’t take any math courses in college. It wasn’t required because I managed somehow to pass the basics in high school. I was relieved; I wasn’t good at math. But I didn’t hate it. A lot of people do, and I understand.
Here Edward Frenkel exhorts us to be curious about math, not to hate it, because human life is abstract and becoming more so. And math, he says, is the key to abstraction.
Funny. I would have said the key to abstraction is poetry. But that’s why I write and don’t do math. Still, he’s right about curiosity: tolerance for all manner of thought is essential to freedom and happiness.
Happy Birthday, Bro
Sending birthday hugs to the best brother a guy could wish for. And a poem.
SHINE
Such a lovely autumn.
We have the orchards
and stars
when the clouds are parted;
the stars we pass to
each other
hand to hand,
as if they were warm.
Stars in my mother’s arms,
brother’s eyes, father’s
voice and resting on
the painted water where I
sleep; shining through
the music of my life:
the adagio of any day at dawn.
Stars, eyes, eyelids
shut against the heat
and stroke of time,
smoke and death,
or just the sea
and its terrible salt.
Stars melt, years pass,
as magic lanterns
reflect the firmament
of stars in an endless row
of nights; weeping, shining
in the orbits of our days.
Shine by Kyle Kimberlin
is Creative Commons Licensed.
Metaphor 