Alexandra

“Only those are in the right who keep an open door for both good and ill, so that each may come but also leave according to its needs. (Letters on Life)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“his drily fastidious, passionate, Frenchified, misanthropic soul was incapable of castle building.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Dad led me over to his cot. A neat pile of books was stacked next to it. He said his bout with TB had set him to pondering about mortality and the nature of the cosmos. He’d been stone-cold sober since entering the hospital, and reading a lot more about chaos theory, particularly about the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at Los Alamos who had made a study of the transition between order and turbulence. Dad said he was damned if Feigenbaum didn’t make a persuasive case that turbulence was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed. “I’m not saying there’s a bearded old geezer named Yahweh up in the clouds deciding which football team is going to win the Super Bowl,” Dad said. “But if the physics — the quantum physics — suggests that God exists, I’m more than willing to entertain the notion.”

Dad showed me some of the calculations he’d been working on. He saw me looking at his trembling fingers and held them up. “Lack of liquor or fear of God — don’t know which is causing it,” he said. “Maybe both.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Yet as he gazed he became aware that at last that it was no magelight, no cold glory of wizardry, that lay shadowless on every line of the man's face, but light itself: morning, the common light of day [...]
Sparrowhawk sat by him watching the dawn come and the sun rise, even as one might study a treasure for something gone amiss in it, a jewel flawed, a child sick.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore