light
discussion forum
background
You might have ideas about ideas - when that light bulb
in your brain starts glowing - about knowledge, illumination,
creativity and enlightenment. What does Australia do with
its ideas and inventions? What are our ideas about humour
and levity? Or the 'unbearable lightness of being'? Do we
collapse and stagger under the pressing weight of the world?
Maybe you wanted to talk about the life sustaining sun or
the destructive greenhouse. Perhaps the light most important
to you is the light of the God and Heaven, the spirit or the
Holy Ghost, or the metaphors of good and evil. Do you bask
in the light of the computer or television screen?
What are your ideas about light? Here are some ideas
about light from others.
No [person] has ever seen the Sun, or ever will. What we
call 'sunlight' is only a narrow span of the entire solar
spectrum - the immensely broad band of vibrations which the
Sun, our nearest star, pours into space ... [The] radiance
of the eternity is not white, it is infra-red
Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Common
Day, in John Carey (ed), The Faber Book of Science, 1995,
Faber, London, p 427
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness
and light.
Matthew Arnold
The light on the hill is a figure of fable in Australian
labour movement culture, but given its origins, I don't think
it's stretching things to think of any and every social democratic
government that achieves some small step to overcoming avoidable
human misery and suffering as an instance of the light on
the hill.
McKenzie Wark, Celebrities, Culture
and Cyberspace: the light on the hill in a postmodern world,
Pluto Press, Sydney, 1999, p 12
Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul
that intense light will not make beautiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A lightning bolt is fire that has been compressed and hurled
violently ... The constricted space of the compressed clouds
forces out the air that is between them and by means of this
pressure sets the air afire and hurls it the way a catapult
does.
Seneca in 62AD
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates
and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
Dante's journey through the celestial realm is not a trip
to other physical 'worlds', as in modern science fiction,
but to a kind of ecstatic cosmic dance through an increasingly
abstract realm of light and motion. Here, luminescent choirs
of angels fill the celestial space with heavenly harmonies
- the mythical music of spheres ... [F]ollowing the Neoplatonic
association of light with grace, bot the individual souls
and the whole celestial environment become progressively more
radiant. Light, as both fact and metaphore, is a distinguishing
feature of the Paradiso.
Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates
of Cyberspace, p62 - 63
NB Wertheim is referring to Dante's medieval text, The Divine
Comedy and the representations of space as Hell, Purgatory
and Heaven
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo
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