So...
Sorry about all the quizzes. Sometimes i just simply cannot contain myself! Anyways, one of my loveliest best friends in the world sent me this passage. I hope all of you enjoy :)
"The mind makes its own opium. The opiate receptors in the brain exist to receive an anodyne from the brain itself. The mind is self-sufficient. We make our own solace. The mind provides for itself out of itself, relieves pain and allows sleep by making whole what was partial and painful.
"Lucretius, who wrote 'on the nature of things,' thought the mind must be something like a pile of poppy seeds. I love antique science, as calm and self-assured as today's, but richly metaphoric and instructively wrong. The mind, Lucretius tells us, 'is very fine in texture and is made and formed of very tiny particles.' His proof? 'Nothing is seen to come to pass so swiftly as what the mind pictures to itself coming to pass and starts to do itself. The mind stirs itself more quickly than the things that stir. But because it is so very nimble, it is bound to be formed of exceeding round and exceeding tiny seeds, so that its particles may be able to move when smitten by a little impulse. Just so, a light trembling breath can scatter a high heap of poppy seeds before your eyes...'
"The 'voice' in my dream had come to speak of the mind. It told me that an idea is really a single wave that moves through the brain, setting off trains of transient lights, details that glimmer, like the oriole, the penny, and the splash in my dream. They are all one movement. It is all one, any idea, a whole, and we only spit out part of it in expression, break it off into articulated bits, words, images, pictures, moments: the whole pile of poppy seeds ripples and shimmers, ruffled by a breath."
--- from Terra Infirma, "Cerebellar Poetry" by Roger Kamenetz, one of her favorite English professors at LSU.
"The mind makes its own opium. The opiate receptors in the brain exist to receive an anodyne from the brain itself. The mind is self-sufficient. We make our own solace. The mind provides for itself out of itself, relieves pain and allows sleep by making whole what was partial and painful.
"Lucretius, who wrote 'on the nature of things,' thought the mind must be something like a pile of poppy seeds. I love antique science, as calm and self-assured as today's, but richly metaphoric and instructively wrong. The mind, Lucretius tells us, 'is very fine in texture and is made and formed of very tiny particles.' His proof? 'Nothing is seen to come to pass so swiftly as what the mind pictures to itself coming to pass and starts to do itself. The mind stirs itself more quickly than the things that stir. But because it is so very nimble, it is bound to be formed of exceeding round and exceeding tiny seeds, so that its particles may be able to move when smitten by a little impulse. Just so, a light trembling breath can scatter a high heap of poppy seeds before your eyes...'
"The 'voice' in my dream had come to speak of the mind. It told me that an idea is really a single wave that moves through the brain, setting off trains of transient lights, details that glimmer, like the oriole, the penny, and the splash in my dream. They are all one movement. It is all one, any idea, a whole, and we only spit out part of it in expression, break it off into articulated bits, words, images, pictures, moments: the whole pile of poppy seeds ripples and shimmers, ruffled by a breath."
--- from Terra Infirma, "Cerebellar Poetry" by Roger Kamenetz, one of her favorite English professors at LSU.