by William Benzon

Jersey City is a medium-size city on the West bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan. Up through the middle of the 20^th century it was a port and a railroad hub but that disappeared when containerized freighter became too deep to travel that far up New York Bay. Without any freighters the railroads were no longer needed. Light industry disappeared as well. Jersey City became back-offices and bedrooms to Manhattan-based business.

In the 19^th century the Morris Canal carried coal from Eastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson River at Jersey City. Most of the canal has been filled in, but the eastern-most bit remains. You can see it in the photo to the upper right. The small building to the left of center is an abandoned industrial building of some kind. As you can see various walls have collapsed, as has part of the roof.

When you get closer you can will that the walls are marked with graffiti, which I saw when I first approached the building in the middle of 2011. The graffiti changed from week to week and month to month. It is for that reason that I took to thinking of it as the ‘urban design studio.’ This is the south wall; the Morris Canal is behind us and the Hudson River is about a quarter mile to the right. Read more »

Brevity

I need a good poem
lifespan-short, one
I can shoe-horn between instants
which in that pinch says so much
I’ll understand long and short
by the depth of calluses
built upon my brain—

but it’s not happening
I’m already up to nine lines
so it’s too late for brevity—

what I want is one
that says something
without rolling on forever,
Amazon-like swaying
to topographical switches and
twists in rivers and streams
or cul-de-sacs of human error,

but now I see
this won’t end here
in brute summation
like a dead fish
wrapped mafia-like in newsprint
warning of impending
but once-avoidable
consequence,

no, it’ll go on
until all nouns,
verbs, conjugations,
& absolute clauses
have been spent,

until this mine of
memory and metaphor
is no more complete
than the store of meanings
dragged inside-out
by the flow of pregnant clauses
rendered in blood & bone
which lead to others and others and others
like cups filled & spilled into the flow
of sea-bound floods of multitudes of
sisters and brothers and cousins,
uncles and aunts and
fathers and mothers;
…………………………….—what if “brevity”
is just one more thing that seems?

Jim Culleny
7/1/18

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by Nils Peterson

At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text out loud. I taught Shakespeare for a bunch of years and did some of this. But this class makes me wish I had done more of having students read out loud. I kept most of the good lines for myself. Selfish. Speaking well-ordered words is one of the great physical pleasures. Yes, physical pleasure. The body responds to good words in the right order (when you say them out loud with appropriate energy) in the way it does to a sip of good wine at evening,

We’ve been doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I got the part of Bottom. Here’s what I got a chance to read and rediscover in the reading:

Bottom: When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep?

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

I had thought to call this piece “The Poetry of Of Incoherence,” but when I thought about it, that title is exactly wrong. Bottom is the most coherent of poets. What is the poet’s job but to find language to explain and share his experience. At this, Bottom is wonderfully successful. His experience is – to be loved by the queen of fairies while wearing an ass’s head. I know enough about wearing an ass’s head in romance to have the publisher of my first book of poems insist that the name of it be The Comedy of Desire. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Some time ago – I can’t remember if it was before, during, or after the pandemic – I read Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, which is an account of Christopher Knight, a man who, in 1986, drove his car as far as he could into the Maine wilderness, adandoned it, and then proceeded to live in the woods without human contact for 27 years. My first reaction, and I sure I’m not alone in this, was to say “Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, to get completely free from everyone!” followed very swiftly by the realization that I wouldn’t last a day in such circumstances, not just due to my total incompetence as an outdoorsman, but also that I have a limited tolerance for isolation. I live what’s likely a more solitary life than most, but I still need contact with people, at least on occasion. Nevertheless, I remain impressed with Knight; like a person who has complete immunity to some serious disease, Knight seems to have been completely invulnerable to loneliness.

A Google search will provide you with a raft of recent articles which informs us of the deleterious social, mental and even physical effects of loneliness, and their increasing pervasiveness. In January of this year, the Atlantic published an article entitled “The Anti-Social Century” about our tendency to isolate even in settings where we used to commune with others; we go to the bar, take out our phones, and drink in a solitude nearly as complete as if we just stayed home. Now, not three weeks after the Atlantic published the above article, it published another one questioning the existence of a loneliness epidemic, so perhaps we can rest a little easy – but the potential seriousness of the issue ought also to concern us. Loneliness is not just a private or purely social concern; there are, as Hannah Arnedt told us, serious political concerns here. Lonely people lose their connection to others and, Arendt thought, to reality itself. These people become deeply manipulable and subject to the predations of those who would unite them into groups bent on destruction; loneliness is a precondition for totalitarianism. A common quality of contemporary warnings against the dangers of loneliness is that we all must “reconnect;” stop looking at your phone at the bar and talk to somebody – the bartender’s always there, right? Read more »

by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, the Voyager space-probe reoriented its camera in the direction of its origin, and was able to capture the furthest image of the Earth ever taken, from almost four billion miles away. Smaller than a single pixel, our world is suspended in a ribbon of luminescence, with Earth appearing as nothing so much as a solitary dust fragment captured in a ray of morning light. The picture was taken at the urging of astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan, who had worked on the original Voyager mission (and was famously involved with the compilation of its “Golden Record”). Acknowledging that there was little concrete scientific benefit to the image, Sagan had argued that reorienting the space probe’s camera so as to record Earth from such a distance would provide a perspective that would be culturally, philosophically, and spiritually beneficial. He considered the implications of that picture four years after it taken, in his celebrated work of science popularization Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. A passage from that book, often informally referred to as “Reflections on a Mote of Dust,” asks the reader to “Look again at that dot.” What follows are five concise paragraphs wherein Sagan does just that, producing one of the most popular passages from a work of scientific journalism written in the past several decades.

Writing in The Atlantic, Marina Koren says that thirty years later, the Voyager image should be understood as a “display, however fuzzy, of humankind’s capacity to catapult away from our planet in an attempt to understand everything else.” Science correspondent for the BBC, Jonathan Amos, declares that the aqua sliver in a field of black is “unquestionably one of the greatest space images ever.” Meanwhile, Carolyn Porco at Scientific American exclaims that the picture “capped a groundbreaking era in the coming of age of our species.” Many peoples’ reactions to the picture, which if a viewer is unaware of what they’re looking at happens not to look like much of all, is understandably filtered through the experience of reading Sagan’s “Reflections on a Mote of Dust.” Perhaps the most talented and widely read popular science writer of the last quarter of the twentieth-century, Sagan was able to avoid the acerbic mean-spiritedness of a Richard Dawkins or the naïve scientificity of a Neil DeGrasse Tyson, writing rather in a poetic idiom that sacrificed nothing in the way of accuracy. Sagan rather belonged to an earlier grouping of scientist-explainers, figures like Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas, and Rachel Carson, who drew upon a rich vein of humanistic expression to use science as a means of contemplation and not just technocratic apologetics, making him a figure as reminiscent of the eighteenth or nineteenth-centuries as much as of the twentieth (in the best way). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

If Wolfgang Porsche, 82, chairman of the supervisory board of Porsche AG, is able to live in a historic landmark villa on the Kapuzinerberg, a forested mountain in Salzburg, he owes a debt to Stefan Zweig, the popular and prolific Austrian writer who bought the rundown 17^th century structure in 1917, at a time when it had no electricity, no telephone, little heating and a treacherous path down the mountain to the city.

“I did most of my work in bed, writing with fingers blue with cold, and after each sheet of paper that I filled I had to put my hands back under the covers to warm them.”  (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European)

The villa, first conceived as a hunting lodge for Prince-Archbishop Paris von Lodron in the 17^th century, was expanded over the following centuries by new owners who gave it new names. Mozart and his sister are said to have performed at the villa. Kaiser Franz Josef bowled there as a boy.

Zweig completely renovated the Paschinger Schlössl, as it is now called, and lived there until 1934, when a fascist police department raided his home on a false pretense. Zweig, who was Jewish, and the best-selling German-language author of that period, read the writing on the wall and moved to London. In 1938, after the Anschluss, his books were burned on Salzburg’s Residenzplatz. Four Stolpersteine serve as reminders of Zweig’s involuntary exit from a city that he loved.

I lived in the cozy shadow of the Kapuzinerberg near the Stefan Zweig villa for four years in the early nineties. At the time, it was still owned by the family who had bought it for a song from Zweig in 1937, but I liked to imagine the cultured author still at home above me—in near solitary splendor—enjoying the best view in town, his only neighbors the novitiates at a nearby Capuchin monastery. Zweig maintained a vast library in his home, and had been a regular at the Café Bazar, which was also my favorite place to soak up the atmosphere over a mélange. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

When promoting her new book in September, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated in an interview as quoted in Politico : “I think the Constitution is alive and well.” She went on – “I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like. I think that our country remains committed to the rule of law. I think we have functioning courts.”

Contrast that with what  conservative icon, one time Supreme Court justice contender, and retired  federal appellate court Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote for Constitution Day – less than two weeks after Justice Barrett’s interview – about Trump’s current presidential term: “He has ruled as if he were a king who is above the law, when in America there are no kings, the law is king and no man is above the law. He has corrupted our democracy and asserted control over our elections in violation of our Constitution. He has refused to faithfully execute the laws, and he has waged war on our Constitution, our Rule of Law, and our Federal Courts . . . . He has sought absolute power, unchecked and unbalanced by other branches of our government, by the several states, by the free press, or by us. He has enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness.”

The Dred Scott Decision:  What a Constitutional Crisis  Can Look Like

The Supreme Court started its new term in October, which may prove to be one of the most consequential in its history in what it does or doesn’t do in protecting democracy and the rule of law. If Justice Barrett would like to know what a constitutional crisis can look like all she has to do is go back in time to another consequential Supreme Court term. In 1857 the Supreme Court helped to set the stage for a constitutional crisis with its infamous decision, Dred Scott v. Sanford, authored by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

Dred Scott was a slave whose  owners took him from Missouri to US territory where slavery was banned. Afterwards as a resident of New York, Scott brought a lawsuit in federal court claiming his status as a slave terminated by entering jurisdictions where slavery was prohibited. Taney teed up the case this way:  “The question is simply this: Can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?”

The answer was no. Taney and the Court found that when the Constitution was ratified slaves were considered “a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated to the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority.” Read more »

This wild apple tree in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, had scores of apples on its leafy branches a month ago but now has just this one last apple still hanging on.

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by Tim Sommers

The economy is not a force of nature. We have some control over it. Granted, it’s also not like a machine controlled directly by levers, switches, and buttons either. But when the state acts, intentionally or not, it often influences the distribution of income and wealth. More often than not, it influences the distribution of wealth and income in reasonably predictable ways. It seems to me that, for this reason alone, we should care what the ideal distribution of wealth should be. The ideal distribution is, at a minimum, one factor we have an ethical obligation to take into account in governing.

Some people say that any ideal distribution is unrealistic, impossible to achieve. That’s alright though. Ideals – perfectionism, utilitarianism, the Ten Commandments – are, as they say, honored as much in their breach. We should still have ideals to follow.

Others say that trying to enforce any particular distribution – equality, first and foremost – leads to coercion and political oppression. I think they say this mostly because they have frightening real-world cases in mind. But people also do terrible things in pursuit of freedom, justice, or whatever.

You certainly can pursue equality in a repressive way. Say, seize everyone’s property, redistribute it, and redo that every so often to maintain equality. But you could also, as I implied above, mostly regard equality (or whatever the correct principle is) as a kind of tie-breaker. For example, the point of health care is not the distribution or redistribution of wealth per se, but when you must decide between two approaches one of which takes you closer, the other further away, from the ideal distribution, there’s nothing repressive about going with the one that also has a positive effect on the distribution of wealth and income. In other words, there is nothing inherently oppressive about pursuing more distributive equality. It just depends on how you do it. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

There’s a strange vulnerability in realizing that no one is coming to comfort you—and a stranger kind of strength in learning that maybe, just maybe, you can do it yourself.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the child I was. Not in some wistful, soft-focus way, but with the fierce clarity of someone trying to understand what was missing—not to assign blame, but to give name to the hunger. At seven, I needed safety. At fourteen, I needed space to be messy, dramatic, unsure. At twenty-seven, I needed someone to tell me I didn’t have to be so hard all the time. And now, I’m learning to become that someone for myself.

There’s a quiet revolution in that sentence—“I’m learning to become that someone for myself.” It sounds gentle, but it’s anything but. It has meant dismantling a scaffolding built over decades, composed of all the coping strategies that once helped me survive: perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-erasure, chronic competence. It has meant walking backwards through the house of my own memory, opening locked rooms, and saying to the younger selves still sitting there: I see you. I’m sorry. I’ve got you now.

No one teaches you how to do this. There’s no roadmap for re-parenting, no syllabus handed out at the start of adulthood that says: “Here is how you’ll hold the child inside you.” Instead, you notice the signs. The way you crumble after criticism. The way you contort yourself to avoid disapproval. The way you ache after certain holidays or scroll through photos of other people’s mothers and feel an inexplicable, wordless longing. The clues are scattered, like breadcrumbs leading back to the places where you first learned your worth was conditional.

What I’ve come to understand is that you can have loving parents and still be emotionally undernourished. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by David Greer

The smallest spider I’ve ever seen is slowly descending from the little metal lampshade above my computer. She’s so tiny, a millimeter wide at most, I have to look twice to make sure she isn’t just a speck of dust. The only reason I can be certain that she’s not is that she’s dropping straight down instead of floating at random.

It’s become almost automatic to reach for the iPhone to obtain a visual record of a wildlife encounter out of the ordinary, and so I do. However, the spider’s size and the fact that she’s now spinning like a miniature dervish presents a challenge beyond my iPhone’s capabilities. You’ll just have to take my word for it that that’s her in the image to the right, the tiny golden blob to the left of the lamp stem.

Perhaps I shouldn’t make assumptions about the spider’s gender, but her size makes verification problematical. Ever since I fell in love with Charlotte’s Web I’ve been inclined to think of spiders as feminine in the absence of evidence to the contrary. I would no more call her an “it” than I would a human, and she doesn’t strike me as a probable “they.” So “she” it will have to be.

Having observed many swarms of aimlessly scrambling baby spiders fresh out of their communal egg sacs, I know that in the not distant future she’ll be many times her current size. And however small she may be today, a few clicks worth of research confirms that she’s a giant compared to some of her cousins. A full-grown Patu digua, quite possibly the smallest spider species on the planet, maxes out at around 0.37 millimeters, about four times the width of an average human hair (75 micrometers).

Accurately determining the size of the tiniest creatures on the planet can be a challenge using standard units of measurement. Read more »

Naotaka Hiro. Untitled (Tide), 2024.

Canvas, fabric dye, oil pastel, rope, and grommets.

“… Several of the paintings feature something strange: two perfectly round openings in the surface of the work.  The Japanese-born, Pasadena-based artist uses these holes to practice a highly intimate kind of artmaking. Collapsing the traditional, arms-length distance between the artwork and the artist, he slips his limbs into these openings to hold the surface close. He often wraps himself in unstretched canvas, creating a cocoon he paints from within (“Untitled (Green Door)”2021, “Untitled (Vector)” 2021). At other times, he lies on his back on the studio floor, his legs poking through a plywood panel so it hovers above him (“Untitled (Frequency)” 2021). He presses parts of his body against the surface as he works, and the strokes and shapes of his paintings and drawings are often the length of a hand, a forearm, or a torso. Each piece is a record of the artist’s position, movements, and sensations during artmaking, from aches and temperature shifts to the rise and fall of his chest with each passing breath. ” From Naotaka Hiro’s Pulp Fiction, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

More here and here.

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by Sherman J. Clark

In a previous essay, Beatrice 2.0, I argued that a love of beauty can guide our desires and help us flourish amid distraction and commodification. But what hinders us from letting beauty lead us in those ways? Beauty abounds—if we can see it. Not only in art, but in sports and music, in craftsmanship and science, in mathematics and everyday life. The trouble is not scarcity—or not merely scarcity—but our own habits of mind.

What hides beauty

We may be able to develop the capacity to see and cherish beauty. But that may first require us to confront a set of obstacles—internal obstacles, patterns of thought and feeling that make it hard to direct our desires where they would most nourish us. Some are what contemporary philosophers call intellectual vices—things that cloud our thinking. Some mirror what older traditions call sins or moral vices: habits of thought and action that mark us for judgment. We can think of these as barriers to flourishing, vices in the eudaimonist rather than moral sense. These are attitudes that keep us from attending to beauty. If we want a label for this sort of inquiry, it would be “neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics.” But elaborate philosophical labels won’t make us happy or guard us against exploitation and commodification. Beauty, however, might—if we can let it.

To that end, we can tentatively identify four internal obstacles—vices, if you will—that can prevent us from nurturing a love of beauty and letting that love help us thrive: impatience, laziness, arrogance, and, more obscure-sounding but perhaps most destructive of beauty, what Aristotle called micropsychia, which we can translate as smallness of soul.

Our impatience is profitable to those who want to keep us grasping at the next thing they can sell us; but it can prevent us from attending to what might matter most. The first few moments of a Bach fugue are lovely, but the transcendent order emerges when we hear it through, and then again, and begin to catch the patterns. Shakespeare’s language can seem strange and off-putting at first, but rereading can reward us with nearly shocking depth and beauty—if our impatience and lack of attention didn’t prevent us from making that effort.

Good and beautiful things often take not just time but also effort. Read more »

by Lei Wang

If not for COVID, I would have moved back to China after my MFA instead of staying in Iowa City. Instead of not seeing him for three years, I would have married my fiancé at the time, an Italian kung fu master in Shanghai who had the peculiar fate of teaching Chinese people their own lost esoteric spiritual practices. I would have then moved with him to an island off the coast of Portugal, where he now lives and teaches at a martial arts retreat center.

But because things happened the way they did, I am not on an island off the coast of Portugal, enjoying the best temperate weather in the world. I am not writing overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and considering the travails of America from the vantage of Europe. I am not married.

I am here, but also if I were there, I would still always be here, wherever I am. And then perhaps I would be dreaming of Iowa, of living five- to ten- minute walks from my friends, all artists of some sort, all expert cuddlers. Perhaps I would be bored and lonely in Portugal; there is only so much good weather one can take.

In a recent newsletter, the writer Suleika Jaouad writes of a What If thought experiment game she plays with a friend that imagines into the other lives they could have lived:

It usually starts when one of us says something like, Remember that guy who wore a lot of vests? and suddenly we’re spiraling: What if I married him and lived in a yurt in Montana, labeling mason jars of lentils in flowery live-laugh-love cursive? What if I had gotten that soulless business consulting job in Dubai and wore pantsuits the exact shade of despair and office lighting? What if I stayed in Vermont instead of moving back to New York City and became a homesteading influencer who films sourdough tutorials with my roommate, a potbelly pig named Meredith? What if I had five children and a timeshare in Sarasota and a minivan full of crushed graham crackers?

What if I hadn’t for some mysterious reason gone down a notoriously financially unrewarding delayed-returns path of writing and instead been a corporate consultant like many other achiever-type humanities majors? On the one hand: oof. On the other: who knows? What if I had simultaneously pursued writing with a career in therapy or even interior decorating? What if I had studied neuroscience and now had my dream alter-ego job, teaching empathy to robots (which sounded far-off a mere few years ago)? Who would I be? Read more »

Cast your bread on the waters:
for you shall find it after many days.
…………………………… —Ecclesiastes

Bread Upon the Water

Oh, the young don’t keep
and the old just go,
and the keeper of the sheep
casts a long, long shadow,
and your song won’t come
where your life won’t go,

so throw your bread on the water,
and beat your feet to the chimes,
and if you have a daughter.
and count your change to the dime.
and if you open up the borders
you’ll let it all fall in behind

Every book just speaks.
and every light just shines,
and every touch just feels,
and every look just finds,
and everywhere just is,
and every road’s a line

—when every deed is done
and you might be feeling so low
like a dream is over,
as if it didn’t grow
but still, the soil is good
and with what we know,

Throw your bread on the water
and beat your feet to the chimes
and if you have a daughter
and count your change to the dime,
and if you open up the borders
it’ll all fall in behind it’ll
fall in behind

poem/song by Jim Culleny, 1970
 1972, Jim Culleny
and Starship Productions

(at link, scroll to bottom)

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by Peter Topolewski

Isn’t it time we talk about you?

You.

A collection in the realm of 4.5 x 10^27 atoms. A portion of your hydrogen and helium atoms originated in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. The heavier elements in you, the stuff of life, the carbon and nitrogen, they came from stars. From exploding stars, in fact. The dying blasts of stars in distant galaxies accounted for perhaps a smallish measure of your atoms. Most came from stars exploding in the Milky Way, and above all from a single super nova that preceded the existence of our own star, the Sun. Like all the others, it was a super nova without a name, one we’ll never know, but one we should be especially grateful for. It was amazing wasn’t it, generous, as Thomas Berry would say, giving itself away without asking?

It gave me you.

Extraordinary, those 4.5 trillion quadrillion atoms in you, from across the cosmos, they’re mostly empty space. Take away the space, and all of them together would be no larger than a single biological cell. As far as those atoms have traveled, as large as the universe has grown, there is, as Duane Elgin wrote, more smallness in you than there is bigness beyond you. On our cosmic scale, you are a giant.

In a photo I’m blessed to have, you’re five or six years old, standing near a farmhouse. Anyone who looked at it would say you’re little, but really you’re a giant. Who are you in that photo?

I could believe I came about randomly, through trial and error, but not you.

You are the atoms in that photo, but much more.

In another picture, you are in your twenties, alone on a chair in a living room, pensive and beautiful. All the atoms you contained when you were six and seven and eight years old, they’re gone, given over to the environment, replaced with others wholly new to you. In that frozen moment, your eyes are on a place only you can see, your mind on thoughts, hopes, concerns I cannot reach.

Who were you?

If you can be composed of other atoms and still be, you can be any atoms, can’t you? And if you can be any, can’t you be all?

Who are you?

You are atoms and more. Read more »