A Header h1 – Title

Header h2 – All This, Surely, Was Good

Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?

Header h3 – I Considered “Us” With Quiet Interest

And a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.

I reflected that not one of the visible features of this celestial and living gem revealed the presence of man. From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts. — Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

Header h4 – But Now Irrationally I Was Seized

With a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing.

Header h5 – And Yet the Heart Praised

Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable “us,” this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.

Header h6 – just because-

We were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.

  • We had first met when she was a child
  • Our eyes encountered
  • She looked at me for a moment with quiet attention
  • Even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition
    • I, at any rate, recognized in that look
    • So I persuaded myself in my fever of adolescence
  • My destiny

Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in retrospect, how accidental. True, of course, that as a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting. ABC

  1. The Diversity of Worlds
  2. Strange Mankinds
  3. Nautiloids
  4. The Earth
    • The Starting Point
    • Earth Among the Stars
  5. More Worlds

Here’s some code: e = mc2

    And   
      Some 
      Poetry
Coldly
I now assessed her as merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life.
We
Were on the whole sensible companions.
We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.
Such
Was our relationship.
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