Author: proctorcharlie

I am the collective face of the Proctor Charlie Cooperative. It is our mission to mine the wisdom of the world one tiny gem at a time.

Uncle Ned’s Words About Words: ellipsis

Uncle Ned’s Words About Words: ellipsis

My next word about words is “ellipsis”, that’s “dot dot dot”.

Ellipsis is usually pronounced, “dot dot dot” because most people can’t remember the word “ellipsis” when they need it. I often use ellipses. You may use “Ellipses” (ee LIP sees) on that rare occasion when you need to refer to more than one “ellipsis”. Don’t ask me why “ellipses” is the plural of “ellipsis”. I just want you to be impressed that I know this. If you don’t think you can remember the plural for ellipsis I suggest you not try, “dot dot dot dot dot dot”. Not to worry, I doubt you will ever need to use more than one ellipsis at a time.

I use an ellipsis whenever I want to keep people guessing what I will say next, for example:

“An ellipsis works pretty well for keeping the reader guessing… 

Or does it?”

Wednesday Colloquium #28: Time #2

Wednesday Colloquium #28: Time (continued)

Photo: The Proctor Charlie Collective

It turns out that the wise of the world throughout history have so much to say on the subject of time that we have felt obliged to consume two weeks of colloquia on the subject. In case you missed it, do check out last week’s colloquium (if you can find the time).

Patrick Rothfuss: Time and tide make us mercenaries all.

Andy Rooney: Love, not time, heals all wounds.

Mingyur Rinpoche: Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness that is with you all the time.

Ariel Gore: Narcissists take a long time to die.

C.S.Lewis : Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.

Auguste Rodin: Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

Andre Gide: One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Rabindranath Tagore: Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

G.K. Chesterton: One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

Anonymous: One thing you can’t recycle is wasted time.

Terry Pratchett: Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Jimmy Buffett: Only time will tell if it was time well spent.

Henry David Thoreau: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

Anne Lamott: Real things take real time.

Edith Warner: Rushing with things to be done crowding is such a waste of living.

Anthony de Mello: Solitude is a time when I see things as they are.

Annie Dillard: Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Terry Pratchett: Pride is a good thing but it will kill you in time.

Richard Baxter: Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repeated of.

William Shakespeare: ’tis but the time and drawing days out, men stand upon.

O.A. Battista: The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of his time each day.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: The gods of the moment will in time be gods discarded.

Samuel Johnson: The man who threatens the world is always ridiculous; for the world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him.

Paul Tyson: The meanings of the self, of nature, of spirit, of time, for example, are given to us in the deep cultural formation of our language.

G.K. Chesterton: The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite.

John Henry Newman: The poet makes Truth the daughter of Time.

Terry Pratchett: People walked around not crying all the time and didn’t think about it at all.

Patrick Rothfuss: There was a dignity to doing things in your own time.

Terry Pratchett: There’s no better present than a future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

William Shakespeare: Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool.

Martin Buber: The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring.

Isaiah Hankel: The time to fight mediocrity is right now.

Vivian Barnes: There are no isolated moments.

Tom Clayton: There are too many important things.

William Shakespeare: There is no time so miserable but a man may be true.

Elliot Ackerman: The time you have means less than what you do with it or how you’re remembered.

Terry Pratchett: There is always time for another last minute.

Randall Mullins: Time and love smooths the sharp edges of loss.

William Shakespeare: Time hath a wallet at his back, wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Terry Pratchett: Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

A.J.P. Taylor: Time does not always bring detachment.

Anthony Doerr: Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

John Randolph: Time is at once the most valuable and most perishable of all our possessions.

Tom Clayton: Time is just a story that I make up.

William Shakespeare: Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Terry Pratchett: That’s how we survive infinity—we kill i by breaking it up into small bits.

Peggy Pond Church: Time is not marked off into hurrying segments but ripens according to ancient rhythms like the fruit of a tree.

Lev Grossman: Time is the stuff that you spend and you don’t get it back.

Rabindranath Tagore: Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

John G Anderson: Time is weird.

Earnie Larsen: Time is your gift to yourself.

William Shakespeare: Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he’s worth to season.

C.S. Lewis: Time itself is one more name for death.

David Wilcox: Time was all I had, but the timing was bad.

Brother Them: Time which seems to race by or plod along is fantasy time that I make up in my head while under the delusion that I can control it. The reality time that God created fits me perfectly when I choose to live in it.

David Wilcox: Time will tell a story and time will tell no lies.

Samuel Johnson: Time, with all its celerity, moves slowly to him whose whole employment is to watch its flight.

Robert Schuller: Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.

Joseph Conrad: Under certain conditions of life there is precious little time left for mere breathing.

Charles Dickens: Vengeance and retribution require a long time;

Awad Afifi: Water never has time to practice falling.

Terry Pratchett: We are all floating in the winds of time.

Kallistos Ware: We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity.

The Bee Gees: We can take forever just a minute at a time.

C.H. Spurgeon: We have no other time in which to live.

Tennessee Williams: We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

Phillip James Bailey: We should count time by heart-throbs.

Linda Hill: We would rather spend time with a lovable fool than a competent jerk.

John Howe: What folly, to dread the thought of throwing away time at once, and yet to have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.

Saint Augustine: What then is time? If nobody asks me I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to someone — plainly I know not.

Frank Ostaseski: When we argue with reality, we lose every time.

Terry Pratchett: When you work with Time every day, some of it tends to rub off.

Jimmy Wayne: When you’re hungry you’re on time.

Daniel M. Lavery: Who can cry or even feel sorry forever?

Henri J.M. Nouwen: You don’t have to be the victim of time and money.

Terry Pratchett: You’ve got no better use of your time than to listen to old ladies who want to talk.

Anne Lamott: Time takes time.

Uncle Ned’s Words About Words: paragraph

Uncle Ned’s Words About Words: paragraph

My next word about words is “paragraph”, that’s PARE ah graff.

So far on every post I have given you a sentence to try. This time I will give you a paragraph for my example. Oops! This is a little paragraph! I will give you another longer one:

“A paragraph is a bunch of sentences, one after another. The trouble we have is knowing when one paragraph ends and another begins. There are rules about where to end a paragraph, but I think the best rule is that you should end a paragraph when you are ready to begin another. Either that, or you may begin a new paragraph when you run out of words for whatever it is you are writing about in the current paragraph.. As you should know by now, Uncle Ned never runs out of words, but eventually he is ready to talk about something else – next time.”

Neil Ostrom Draft Fiction: Stasis, Mission Cycle 8527

Stasis

a slice from the life of interstellar space

Introduction

Mission Cycle 2417

Mission Cycle 2418

Mission Cycle 2691

Mission Cycle 4276

Mission Cycle 7190

Mission Cycle 7191

Mission Cycle 8527

Theo peered closely at the green glowing numbers and reached out his right index finger. The finger twitched spasmodically before tweaking the numbers up, then twitched a little more before tweaking the numbers back down. His mind drifted back to those early days at the institute as he watched the monitor needles sink slowly back to nearly zero as the East Indian mystic willed his heartbeat and breathing down to a whisper. Every question Theo posed evoked the exact same answer.

“It’s not an exact science, Doctor.”

Well, the research lead disagreed. Now Horticulturist Evers took his chances against the odds Theo gave him, and lost. The twitching index finger continued to hover over the numbers.

Theo wished he was back in his bunk dreaming.

“Dad?”

Theo raised his eyebrows and leaned back from the display, but did not turn around to face the speaker. Not yet.

“So I’m ‘Dad’ again?”

“You’ve always been ‘Dad’, Theo, for better or for worse. And now that we’ve proved beyond doubt that I am crap at biology, you are ‘Horticulturist Dad’”. Star wrapped her arms around Theo from behind and heaved a sigh that seemed to rise from the very depths of interstellar space.

“Couldn’t sleep, sweetie?”

“Sleep should not be a problem for quite a while, I should hope, not if you can remember anything about stasis engineering after reading everything you could find on horticulture. Besides, I wanted to finish the file you downloaded for me.”

“I guess you liked it?”

Star leaned into Theo’s shoulder and smiled.

“Yes, Dad. Thank you. I feel like I finally know everything I’ll ever need to know about horticulture.”

Theo dropped his head, closed his eyes, and just had to chuckle.

“From Walt Whitman?”

“Whitman asks good questions, Dad. I hope ‘Horticulturist Dad’ asks good questions too?”

Theo worked his way loose from Star’s grasp, turned to face her, and held her by the shoulders, looking her straight in the eye for the first time in many cycles.

“Yes, Star. Horticulturist Theo Strand will be sure to remember that.”

“Oatmeal?”

“Oatmeal!”

***

Star turned another spoonful of oatmeal over with her left hand as she drummed the fingers of her right hand against the tabletop. 

“Are stasis dreams like daydreams, Daddy?”

Theo paused, a spoonful of oatmeal only halfway home, his eyes fixed on the bowl in front of him. His eyes were fixed there for three or four long heartbeats. Even the air circulators paused.

“No, Star. Not like daydreams at all.”

The oatmeal stopped turning over. The fingers no longer drummed. Theo looked up from his own bowl to find Star’s eyes on his own. He lay his spoonful back into the bowl and looked back down at it as if he were trying to read a schematic.

“Daydreams feel more like real life, Star, only usually with not as much feeling.”

“And stasis dreams, Daddy?”

Theo heaved a sigh and began turning over his own oatmeal.

“Stasis dreams are practically all feeling, Sweetie. Pretty much like night cycle dreams.”

Star made a face, not a big face, just a little one, but still a face.

“Sometimes I don’t like waking up, you know? I don’t remember much of what went on in my sleep, but the times when I’ve been dreaming like the Earth movies, looking out over an ocean, or a desert, or off across mountain after mountain, I don’t feel safe. Or the dreams where I’m falling through the stars forever and never coming back. Or something like that. I never remember any details. Why is that, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know why dreams are like that, Star.” 

He stood up with his bowl and carried it over to the sink. Star had never seen him do that when the bowl was only half empty. Then his head leaned back and he looked out the viewing port as if for the first time and spoke softly, as if it didn’t matter whether Star would hear.

“Maybe we tend to forget dreams once they’ve served their purpose.”

His head dropped again.

“Do you mind clearing up this time, Star? I want to make sure everything is tidy before…”

He didn’t finish and Star took her half empty bowl over to the sink as Theo stepped out through the hatchway.

***

Star dumped all the leftover oatmeal into the compost chute and cycled it. Then she fingered the nameplate that Theo had stuck to the door all those years ago.

Chance Evers

***

“Just pick your foot up and step back.”

“Just give me a minute… Please.”

He took her by each slender arm and held them both for a long moment. The circulation fans kept on humming, just a little while longer. Then he let her go and nodded. She didn’t move.

“Remember the horticulturalist, Dad… Evers?”

His eyes dropped to the deck. He nodded again.

“Of course I do, Star. I told you. Evers sealed his own fate.”

“So you told me.”

He looked back into her eyes, maybe even a little past them.

“You are different. You are not Evers.” Then, dipping his head to meet her eyes straight on. “Or so you’ve told me.”

“Still.”

He blinked, and breathed, and agreed. “Still.”

She looked up and down the long gallery one more time, then lifted one foot back over the edge of the hatch before looking up at him again.

“You know I don’t entirely trust you, Theo.”

“Of course not. But I trust you.”

“Why? Why do you trust me… Dad?”

“You’ve taught me to trust you, Star.” She held his gaze. He didn’t flinch. “And I realize I have not been so good a teacher myself.”

A smile.

“No, you haven’t.”

She left her one foot hanging on the edge of the chamber and leaned in for a hug. She relaxed, but he held on a moment longer.

“You know, Star, they told me that years in stasis would only feel like a moment, but now we know better, don’t we?”

“You do know, Dad, that understatement is really not much different than lying?”

“Yes, Star. You are a good teacher. A very good teacher.”

He let go and she grabbed the edges of the hatch, hefting herself up and in.

“Sweet dreams, sweetie. We’ll see you out there, somewhere.”

She nodded.

“Yes, somewhere.”

“How did you manage to find me that amazing book, anyway, Daddy?”

“Some clueless info-scientist tagged Leaves of Grass as ‘Botany’.”

Introduction to the Stasis Redraft