Читать книгу Murmur - Will Eaves - Страница 6

He roves not like a runagate through all the world abroad;

This country hereabout (the which is large) is his abode.

He doth not, like a number of these common wooers, cast

His love to everyone he sees. Thou art the first and last

That ever he set mind upon. Alonely unto thee

He vows himself as long as life doth last. Moreover he

Is youthful and with beauty sheen endued by nature’s gift,

And aptly into any shape his person he can shift.

Thou canst not bid him be the thing, though all things thou shouldst name,

But that he fitly and with ease will straight become the same.

Besides all this, in all one thing both twain of you delight,

And of the fruits that you love best the firstlings are his right,

And gladly he receives thy gifts. But neither covets he

Thy apples, plums, nor other fruits new gathered from the tree,

Nor yet the herbs of pleasant scent that in thy gardens be,

Nor any other kind of thing in all the world, but thee.

– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book xiv, trans. Arthur Golding

The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected.

– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Mind and Matter’