Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

We live our lives, suggested Rilke, in widening circles that reach out across the entire expanse.

The term mayday—coined in England in 1923, but derived from the French, venez m’aider, come to my aid—is always repeated three times, mayday, mayday, mayday. The repetition is vital: if said only once it could possibly be misinterpreted, but said three times in a row, it cannot be mistaken.

Know your enemy, know yourself.

Later Hertzl wrote: If you divide death by life, you will find a circle.

Smadar. From the Song of Solomon. The grapevine. The opening of the flower.

Abir. From the ancient Arabic. The perfume. The fragrance of the flower.

To be or not to be with you is the measure of my time. ~ Borges ~

And you may ask yourself, What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself, Where does that highway go to? And you may ask yourself, Am I right, am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?

It didn’t matter that they were repeating the same words over and over again. They knew that the people they spoke to were hearing it for the first time: at the beginning of their own alphabets.

Certain birds are said to sleep in mid-flight. They do so in short ten-second bursts, usually after nightfall. The bird is able to switch off one side of its brain in order to rest, while the other side continues its rhythmic vigilance to avoid crashing into a fellow flier and to watch out for predators.

In the ninth century, the Chinese accidentally created the explosive mixture—75 parts saltpeter, 15 parts charcoal, 10 parts sulfur—when they were looking for the elixir of life.

And we think the myths are startling.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on, and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time.

Burton traveled the world in pursuit of gnosis: he wanted to discover the very source of meaning and existence.

The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilization from the hovering menace of war?

Beyond that, anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.

It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

If you divide death by life you will find a circle.

Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.

We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die.

Avoid that which requires an apology.

Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.

the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Chromesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which sounds automatically evoke the experience of a color.

Flower of my imagination, I guarded her in my heart.

Forgive us our longing, Ghazzawi wrote, if it intensifies.

In the morning a small red aspirin of sun rose.

In science, the hard problem of consciousness is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to our subjective experience of the mind and the world.

Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music.

In the second half of the twentieth century psychiatrists began to notice an increasing number of tourists in Jerusalem suffering from acute psychotic decompensation: delusions and other episodes induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem.

Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naïve, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

The word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, suggesting the repair of broken bones.

Peace comes dropping slow, as Yeats says, but one of its inevitabilities is that it does arrive, it must arrive.