Tag: Billy Collins’ “The Apple That Astonished Paris”

The Limits of Memory

HPIM3510

You have insufficient memory.

Deadpan.  As if no irony were involved, my computer informed me it had aborted the task of uploading digital pictures.

I don’t ask that much of my computer, but there you have it.

I had amassed more than 1300 photos on my wee camera.  Too many pictures, with nowhere to go.

At first my rapidly antiquating computer flashed a sign that I was low on memory.  Then, having failed to get a reaction from me, it balked like a testy toddler and shut itself down, refusing to even consider loading another picture until I cleared space on my hard drive.

The only way to do this was, at long last, to go through the archives and dispense with the over and under-lit shots, the closed eyes, the needless near-identical extras.  The pictures that simply were not special enough to occupy space in my memory.

I should have known this would be . . .  problematic. Continue reading “The Limits of Memory”

Where Heaven Meets the Earth and Sea

At the spot in Dublin where a small seashell filled with Jim’s ashes wafted into the sea, a tiny spray of them lifted by a breeze into an arc that glittered in the rising sun, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish heaven from earth, or earth from the sea.
I looked at the blush sea and sky “as the sea’s own beat resumed and made him part of the cadence of its waves,
. . .turquoise with rolling white tops.”
Many of my own words will follow in future posts about our travels, but for now I’ll share some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s:
Ireland 1524
See the mountains kiss high heaven
   And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
   If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
   And the moonbeams kiss the sea. . . 

 

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