Another Breath: If I screw up here....

Quoting actor Steve Martin as the father of 12 kids in "Cheaper by the Dozen" as he resigns from his dream job as high powered football coach:

"If I screw up with my family, nothing else I've done will matter."

Devotion, Inspiration, and "The Noonday Brightness of Human Genius"

"... Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

- Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

If I screw up here....