#BlackSails #VaneandEleanor

to love and lose and still be kind.

Warsan Shire (via wordsnquotes)

Harper’s Christmas Number, 1893. Edward Penfield (American, 1866-1925). Cover art. Included is How Love Came. A Poem. Alice Archer Sewall.

“THE night was darker than ever before (So dark is sin),  When the Great Love came to the stable door And entered in, And laid Himself in the breath of kine And the warmth of hay,  And whispered to the Star to shine And to break, the Day. O flowers underneath the snow That chilled His feet,  As He passed by did ye not know His footsteps sweet?…”

Hangover Square. Patrick Hamilton. New York: Random House, 1942. First American edition. Original dust jacket.

“This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose. They were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street.”

The Song (1907). William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Oil on canvas. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

The woman in white perhaps has been working diligently at the table covered with books and papers. The piano music and song from her companion has moved her. She pushes back from her work, put her head down to listen, and receives a pleasant respite from her labours.

My child: Who became President after Obama?

Me:

When Mankind Was Young. F. Britten Austin. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1927. First edition. Original dust jacket. 

Collection of linked stories set in prehistoric times. “Druid rite when a human sacrifice was made, or at the festival where the fairest pair of lovers was offered to the savage god in the Spring to insure bountiful crops.”

How Many Species Share Our Planet?

The answer: we have NO IDEA. Most taxonomists think that we have not even begun to discover all the species that live on Earth.  After nearly 250 years of organized study and exploration, and the finding of over 15,000 new living beings each year, taxonomists are still uncomfortable giving concrete estimates. And they are the experts! What makes counting species so hard?

Scientists have identified and named nearly 8.7 million species, but that number is constantly challenged by scientists presenting new methods and models for estimating how many more we have to find. Statistical models are the most inexact of sciences. And scientists are proposing new models for estimating the number of species every year, each with wildly different numbers.

But it’s not just statistics. One of the biggest reasons we do not know how many species share our planet is that 99 percent of all potential living space is under the ocean, and we humans have explored less than 10 percent of it.

Hi-Res stills for “War and Peace”. More pictures here. 

So I’ll remain within your reign, until my thoughts can travel somewhere new… and I wonder if you wonder about me too.