Cloud city

If you [go] all the way to the top of Venus’s [hostile] atmosphere, you’re rewarded with — shockingly — pleasant, livable conditions. Randomly, at the top of Venus’s clouds is a layer where the temperature and pressure are similar to those on Earth, and because oxygen and nitrogen both rise in Venus’s dense atmosphere (like helium does on Earth), the air in that layer might actually be close to breathable. That’s led some scientists to actually discuss human colonization of Venus’s high atmosphere, building “cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.”

Wait by Why Tim Urban

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long.

Invisible Cities Italo Calvino


Image NASA

Maximum strangeness with maximum simplicity

It is cheering to think than an object so different from all others, a from that achieves the maximum strangeness with the maximum simplicity and regularity and harmony, is rotating in the sky. 

 “If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now,” Mr Palomar thinks, “they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato’s ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.”

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino (1983)


Image: NASA

The cosmos seen as a bubble

Moving through this crowded space, the pilgrim enters into the underlying “emptiness” — really a kind of infinite spaciousness—that is the stuff of Tibetan Buddhist reality. It may be strange to think that a universe so densely populated is actually, in some profound sense, empty. Judging by the literary sources we have available, to take this spaciousness into oneself, momentarily clearing heart and mind of the detritus that normally clogs our perceptions, provides a sense of vast psychic relief. The seemingly empty space is, however, a highly active arena within which our minds weave the web that we take to be the world—a world filled with objects such as Maitreya’s towers and manifold creatures and, of course, these same Buddhas and Bodhisattvas continuously emerging out of empty space and dissolving back into it.

— David Shulman

The description in the Gaṇḍa-vyūha of Sudhana's vision of the towers of Maitreya could almost be from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:

He saw the tower immensely vast and wide, hundreds of thousands of leagues wide, as measureless as the sky, as vast as all of space, adorned with countless attributes; countless canopies, banners, pennants, jewels, garlands of pearls and gems, moons and half-moons, censers giving off fragrant fumes, showers of gold dust….Also, inside the great tower he saw hundreds of thousands of other towers similarly arrayed; he saw those towers as infinitely vast as space, evenly arrayed in all directions, yet these towers were not mixed up with one another, being each mutually distinct, while appearing reflected in each and every object of all the other towers.

View of the Tabo monastery by Christian Luczanits

Different light and different silence

In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper. From the highest tree Cosimo, in his yearning to enjoy to the utmost the unusual greens of this exotic flora and its different light and different silence, would let his head drop upside down, so that the garden became a forest, a forest not of this earth but a new world in itself.

— from The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1959)

On Maps, 2

In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings: a universe was scrawled over the sides, along all dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference: the Galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn’t exist and perhaps had never existed.

— from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (1965)

Image: The Sloan Great Wall. W. Schaap et al. (2007) via APOD

"As if you were among Angels"

Yesterday I went to Hereford to study the Mappa Mundi and other materials relevant to research for the book. I made an early start so that I could walk over wooded hills to the west in the morning light.

Pockets of ancient semi-natural woodland at Credenhill Park Wood include numerous old yews. Ash trees edge the embankment around a clearing at the top of hill where more than 2000 years ago was a great fort. There are views from here to a great distance.  Thomas Traherne wrote:

Your enjoyment never is right, till every morning you wake in Heaven, see yourself in your Father's palace, and look upon the Skies, the Earth, the Air as Celestial Joys, having such Reverend Esteem of all, as if you were among Angels.

Speaking on Today this morning in connection with the Living Symphonies project, Richard Mabey noted that some 20 different senses have been identified in the plant kingdom.   Walking in Badnage Wood yesterday brought to mind this from Italo Calvino:

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Images taken with a mobile phone. Hence the poor quality