Library of Congress

One place I have never been in DC was inside the Library of Congress. The main show piece is the Jefferson building, which sits neatly nestled in front of the US Capitol building. I decided it was time to see if I could find page 47 of the presidents book for myself, and took a look.

I was amazed by the sheer amount of information and meaning embedded into the walls, the floors, the celling of the building. It is a stunning space, and well worth the trek to see it.

There are a number of quotes scattered around the walls, but two stood for to me (for obvious reasons):
Books Must Follow Sciences, and not Sciences Books --Francis Bacon 

Science is Organized Knowledge --Immanuel Kant

Oh yeah, and I took some pictures...HDR style I think they turned out very nice as well...take a look for yourself (click the picture to enlarge).

Hunter S. Quote

A passage from Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angles (1966): 

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular--especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. 

I am not really sure what happened to the generation that thought this, to me it seems they did not really do anything to "fix" the American dream. However, maybe that was the point, they just checked out and let the rest of the pieces fall where they may.

Did anyone else have such thoughts as a child?

I came across a passage in On the Road that stuck a strong a chord with a memory from my childhood.

"I told Dean that when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. "Yes! Yes!" yelled Dean. "I used to do it too only different scythe--tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had to be immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reach another level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road, regular throbbing poles. ..."

Now...you might ask, "Why did that dredge up a childhood memory?"

On the Road

I should like to think the sentiments expressed below are indeed true, but I lack the ability to draw the comparison to the great american West as was so eloquently done by Jack. Either way, I really like this quote:

"I thought the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford build his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were no great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy."

John Muir on Naturalists

I was watching part of the latest Ken Burns documentary “National Parks” and came across a quote that I really liked:

“The man of science, the naturalist, too often loses sight of the essential oneness of all living beings in seeking to classify them in kingdoms, orders, families, genera, species, etc., taking note of the kind and arrangement of limbs, teeth, toes, scales, hair, feathers, etc., measured and set forth in meters, centimenters, and millimeters, while the eye of the Poet, the Seer, never closes on the kindship of all God's creatures, and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as "earth-born companions and fellow mortals" equally dependent on Heaven's eternal love.”

It also comes to mind what Nietzsche had to say on the issue:  

“I distrust all systematists and I avoid them. The will to a system represents a lack of honesty.”