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      “Nobody will deny that in a world in which everything is connected through cause and effect, and in which no miracles ever happen, each part is a mirror of the whole. If a pea is shot into the Mediterranean, an eye that is sharper than our own but infinitely less fine than the eye that sees all would be able to trace the effect on the coast of China. And what other is a particle of light which contacts the surface of the eye compared to the mass of the brain and its nerves?” This is one of my favorite passages in Lichtenberg. It expresses a great idea, a fantastic idea, the imagery of which has a sort of hypnogogic flickering, as though Lichtenberg had magically been able to recover one of those great ideas that one has just as one is falling asleep, which are forever lost to the consciousness that wakes the next morning.  I often think of this passage when I read someone assessing the importance of an author or event, especially when they do so to make some invidious point.

  Geography lesson The clams clamor on the shore I walk by – a tempus fugitive leaving behind a bitch’s spoor. This is life. This is how I live. We’re all undressed in its big blue eye - that ill named, that surly Pacific. Our tsunami will come by and by - divorce, mass shooting, penny panic of all the investments we should never have made. isn’t this life? This is how I live among tanned life guards in their umbrella shade the beach is a tempus fugitive. I’m an Atlantic girl. I see Europe I see Africa. This is how I live. I’ve come to Cali and I’ve lost my scope. I’m homesick, I’m – a tempus fugitive. - Karen Chamisso