Crouch Blake

“If that’s the truth, if it’s our emotional state that’s somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a place is your rage and jealousy going to take us? You can’t hold on to this energy as you open a new door. You have to find a way to let it go.”

I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.

No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.

For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened.

—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

“Quantum mechanics. Intro stuff mainly. Nothing too terribly sexy.”

“Just a question, but do you see yourself more as a research scientist or a teacher these days?”

Now, if the people around me”—he gestures at his students who have begun to crowd in—“are sharp enough to absorb knowledge by sheer proximity to me…great. But the passing on of knowledge, as it were, doesn’t interest me. All that matters is the science. The research.”