Red Mug, Blue Linen : Hellas on fire ii

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Hellas on fire ii

Grey apparitions at verandah ends
like smoke, divisible, but one
your age is ashes, its coherence gone...

Derek Walcott
Verandah, 1st verse
Collected Poems, 1986

Laurent

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Laurent: Writing to a colleague in the 1930s, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli confessed, “I have done a terrible thing. I’ve postulated a particle that can not be detected.” Eventually, Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his Exclusion Principle, i.e., all material particles exhibit space-occupying behaviour - and could very well fall within the province of restaurants. I wonder if red mug, blue linen will be that terrible thing, a postulate without a particle - that a gentleman is only that creature whose nourishment occupies no space. But whether that is true, is less urgent to know than where it comes from.

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