Wave-particle duality

Where I saw waves, he saw particles.

They are two aspects of the same thing – you see what you look for. Ask Niels Bohr.

And so events are what you make them with hindsight, not what they were intended at the time? The Ministry of Truth has spoken.

All for nothing, and nothing for all

Bit late for a U-turn, bint. Waaaaay too late.

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.’

I’ll be in the shallows, then.

Interregnum

An interregnum, like many things, can only be defined in retrospect. When the first ruler is dead, and there is no heir apparent, you don’t know whether it is the end of the monarchy – time for a republic – or whether there is a new king waiting in the wings. Or a Protectorate.

Perhaps I need a protector.

Tightrope

Venetian acrobats walked a tightrope stretched between the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile. Did people watch to see them walk or see them fall?

My tightrope is breaking, strand by strand. Some were cut through, some just snapped under the strain. How many are left? How many will hold? Any? Enough? Should I just jump now?

Larkin’s rabbit

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

….

You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

 

Still

Columns of infamy

The Italians like to bear a grudge – for centuries. A column of infamy records in stone the misdeeds of a traitor or other despicable person, shaming them for all eternity. It’s a very good revenge. Now we have the revenge novel, or even revenge article – the magazine column of infamy.

But is infamy or obscurity the harsher punishment? Dante’s victims in Inferno would have been swallowed by the tide of time long ago if he had not written about them, immortalising  them as footnotes in history.