Black Beauty Orange | Midcentury Modern Art | Large Hanging Mobile by Mark Leary Designs

Mobile: Black Beauty Orange

on (what) matter(s)

“Just because you can’t hold it in your hands,” said fox, “doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

Thoughts while making
Have you heard the story of the man and his overstuffed shoes? It begins like this:

"There is a legend circulating about a late distinguished scientist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots much too large for him.”

It’s a tale of our times, insight into the insides:

“He had developed a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world."

As cautionary conjure, it’s both lens and microscope:

“A stroll across his living-room floor had become, for him, something as dizzily horrendous as the activities of a window washer on the Empire State Building. Indeed, with equal reason, he could have passed a ghostly hand through his own ribs.”

Inviting a re-consideration of who, what, how, and even why:

“The quivering network of his nerves, the awe-inspiring movement of his thought had become a vague cloud of electrons interspersed with the light-year distances that obtain between us and the further galaxies.”

A recognition that things as they actually are mightn’t have been what we believed:

“This was the natural world which he had helped to create, and in which, at last, he found himself a lonely and imprisoned occupant.”

Offering an opportunity to reflect on meaning and matter, purpose and intent:

“All around him the ignorant rushed on their way over the illusion of substantial floors, leaping, though they did not see it, from particle to particle, over a bottomless abyss.”

A chance to pause to sort this from that, essential from the dispensable:

“There was even a question as to the reality of the particles which bore them up.”

And an occasion to define substance and substantive, on our own terms, once and for all:

“It did not, however, keep insubstantial newspapers from being sold, or insubstantial love from being made.”

What’s one “thing” you will bring forward or leave behind?

Quotes from the genius that is Loren C. Eiseley and his book, “The Star Thrower”