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| Small or big? Here's the answer |
A friend recently blogged she had “nothing to say today.” More or less. I felt bound to discuss.
Don’t tell me I can’t, that it doesn’t exist. George Gershwin turns it into a thing of pride:
I got plenty of nuthin’, and nuthin’s plenty for me
Among other things, nothing is an absence and that can vary. Absence of food and I’m hungry. Absence of Donald Trump and I’m tranquil.
Is nothing microscopic or gi-normous? I think my carefully rendered drawing resolves that knotty philosophical point.
A blind man on the top of the Empire State Building looks out on God’s finest creation (Some might disagree here) and sees nothing. But what about all those flashes of imagination and laughter passing through his mind? They’re real to him. Might reality and nothing co-exist?
I read a James Paterson novel (unlikely, I assure you). Half an hour later details of the plot have been swept into the ether. A day later and I can’t be sure I read it. Two days later and I’m sure I didn’t. He happened, now he’s nothing. OK by me.
I consecutively drink a dozen different bottles of cheap sauvignon blanc. The difference in taste between them is indistinguishable. Perhaps there’s no difference. Has “difference in taste” become “nothing”?
Threesome, a novel. 5314 words
(Arthur*) had opened with an intensely detailed critique of the concert in which he sneered cruelly about the clarinetist’s inability to handle the concerto’s semi-quavers. Barbara ** sought a detour: “I understand you play the organ at St Erasmus?”
Arthur smiled fractionally. “Indeed but I wouldn’t bore you with any of that.”
Instead he bored them by slipping into his “sociable” mode…Another half-minute on how to choose a watering-can rose…
* Gladys’s “boyfriend”. ** Gladys’s mother.
Another song springs to my mind - "Me an' Bobbie McGee" by Kris Kristofferson, some words of which are:
ReplyDelete"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free
Feelin' good was easy, Lord,
When Bobby sang the blues
And feelin' good was good enough for me"
Avus: Thanks for joining in the wordplay. "Nothing" is an interesting word, it has philosophical, mathematical and pejorative implications as well thirty lines of definition in the dictionary. Hours of harmless fun.
DeleteNo thing. I really like your drawing. Thanks for scaling down the universe for us.
ReplyDeleteColette: Of course I could have provided a single black dot and pretended this was the black hole into which the whole universe had been swallowed.
ReplyDeleteRR, I do like the way you can knit a sweater out of a twig, a single hair, and a flake of skin.
ReplyDelete