Truth and Fiction

"Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it." --G. K. Chesterton

Hmm...I wonder if Beowulf really did swim in his armor.

Typing Troubles

Woe is me.  I must apologize for the brevity of this post.  My typing capabilities have been sadly inhibited by the sudden removal of my long fingernails.  I broke one while I was doing laundry this evening, so I decided to take them all off.  Sadly, my fingers are in a strange state of shock, and I am finding it difficult to punch the keys correctly.


And I have a pile of block quotes to type for a rough cut outline due tomorrow.  Oh, woe is me.

Scribblings

A crazy piece of a story I was working on once...

Supremacy

“Go West!” Greeley said. And we have gone west. We have gone to the farthest places of the earth. We have gone even to the moon. And why should we not go to the red planet also? So here I sat, in the Santa Maria of the 21^st century, waiting to set foot on the New World. My eyes eagerly peered from my window, wandering in delighted admiration over the vast frontiers of the unexplored continent, and I thought that I had never before beheld such unparalleled grandeur. I thought to myself, “This then is the supreme entity—land—the ground beneath a man’s feet. What is there greater in the universe? What is more truly the basis of civilization than the ground on which it is built? And who greater than the men who discover it?” In my mind, I reviewed the names of all the explorers of whom I had ever heard. Erickson, De Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Livingston, and Armstrong passed in a great parade before me till the last in the line held out his hand to me and I became one of them.

With this thought it occurred to me that I was looking in the wrong direction. Surely, it was not land that was greatest, but the men who conquered it. I turned my eyes from the window, to the interior of the spaceship. The majesty which I had at first seen outside, now seemed to be outshone by the glory of ourselves. The men who surrounded me seemed to radiate it, but I thought myself the brightest. The thought flashed through me that at last we had conquered the Olympus of the gods and had ourselves become gods.

The order came to land, and instantly there was a great rush for the door. I had thought we were gods; now I wondered if we were even men. We became almost beasts each in our wild efforts to be the first to set foot on the new territory. I struggled as hard as the rest, but though I bit and scratched, it was my misfortune to be the smallest of the party, and I stepped out last.

Immediately, I was oppressed with a sense of my own insignificance. Could I actually have made a god of such a puny creature as I? Quickly, I looked at my companions. They seemed to have shrunk to half their former size. I found that I was afraid—terrified—a small child alone in the dark. If this was Olympus, then we had not conquered it, nor the god of it. I turned to flee to the spaceship but it also had shrunk. Where could I hide from the glory to which I had foolishly climbed? I fell to my knees and cried, “Oh God, when will we reach the bounds of our habitation? How long till Thou sayest ‘Thus far and no further’? Have we not built Babel high enough?”

Then I looked at the blackness of space around me and I laughed. The universe was not large enough to hold the Eternal and had I thought that I had reached His dwelling place? We had not come so far. We were but human and the creation stretched beyond Mars. 

...kinda fun making the poor guy go through so many wrong attitudes towards man and the cosmos before he hits on the right one.