The Russians

I stole this quote from Jeremy Denk. It's by Vladimir...I'm drawing a blank, here, he wrote "Pale Fire", a delightfully whacko novel......Nabokov!

In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles--no matter the imminent peril--these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

One could, with a good microscope, spend the rest of one's life studying a spoonful of dirt. The examination of Martian soils or Moon soils is important precisely because there is so little happening there that there is at least some possibility of making sense of it.

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