The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
This is how I feel when I try to explain — you TAKE something TO (far) and … you BRING something BACK from far!!!!! o well. sigh
Might as well try to correct “me and him” is “He and I” aarrrrgh!
HIM has now replaced HE pretty much universally, even with journalists in interviews.
Barbara – 🙂 Oh well, indeed. The language, she changes.
Soon we’ll be saying HER changes…
🙂 Go for it.
Gorgeous!
Back here in Ottawa we are in a de-saturated world.
Barbara – Yes, shades-of-grey is my dominant impression of an Ottawa winter.
Near and far, and past present and future, get somewhat confused when you deal with quantum factors in sub-atomic physics. And with things like wormholes and time warps and what Madeleine L’Enge called “a wrinkle in time…”
I mean, when you have two quarks at opposite ends of the universe, and one is spinning clockwise and the other is spinning counter-clockwise, and they’re linked together, do near and far have any meaning any more?
Jim T
Jim T – No, maybe not. When dealing with things so much bigger or smaller than the human scale, most of our human-constrained notions lose coherence.