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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
“Medals are small things in the light of the stars,” she would later write. “There’s only one thing in the world of any real importance, and that is goodness.”
Where does it live, that place of permission that lets a person chart a new terrain of possibility, that makes her dare to believe she can be something other than what her culture tells her she is, and then become what she believes she can? How does something emerge from nothing?
Comets of chance and tides of circumstance sculpt the shorelines of the self to make us who we are—we can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments, and it is often difficult to separate the elements of life that make for fortune from those that make for misfortune.
The world’s male chivalry has perished out, But women are knights-errant to the last; And, if Cervantes had been greater still, He had made his Don a Donna.
“to kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact”
As birthdays temper the delicious illusion of our own inevitability with the hard fact that we were once inconceivable, so comets remind us that the life of the universe operates on cycles independent of and far grander than our own lifespans.
