Apollonianposts - Apollonia

musings on poetry Anne Sexton, Victoria Chang, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sandburg, Richard Blanco, Henrik Edoyan, Anne Sexton, Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Blanco, Mary Oliver

Instagram: danielapardor

Of chess, it has been said that life is not long enough for it, but that is the fault of life, not chess.

-William Napier

"i can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people."

isaac newton

What a beautiful book. The afterword of made me cry after a long emotional journey of small glimpses of his life:

"...the coffin had been covered with yellow flowers, 'his favorite color [...] a symbol of the light of which he dreamed both in his heart and in his work.'"

— Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

A tiny devil vitrified in a prism of glass. In the 18th century, the Imperial Treasury of Vienna attested that this was a real demon which had been trapped in glass during an exorcism in Germany a century earlier. ⁣From the Kunsthistorisches Museum Collection, Vienna.⁣

“the literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself”

- Albert Camus

the physics students

as requested by the wonderful @starferns

the chalkboard at the front of the lecture hall, covered in equations and graphs

visualizing a problem in your mind, step by step

cold water with ice cubes and a slice of lemon

diagrams drawn hastily on the corner of your paper, scribbled lines and half formed thoughts

replicating famous experiments and demonstrations

watching youtube videos late at night, picking apart complex theories

having an instinct for force diagrams and direction of motion

rushed, messy handwriting

finding beauty in motion and calculation and precision

seeing the universe as unimaginably small and unimaginably large at the same time

a well-worn grey sweater, frayed a little at the sleeves

equations scribbled on your arm until you know them by heart

studying newton and meitner and plank, all those who went before

talking with your hands, forming the shapes of arcs and trajectories as you work through a problem

long hallways and cold, sunny days

late night study groups

staring up at the sky, knowing exactly why and how the planets move as they do

trying einstein’s thought experiments

an old grandfather clock, pendulum measuring the passage of time

pages filled with calculations and precise strings of digits

I am, as the poets say, a disaster.