wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

Here, the Sky

Mars will gamble or will not be
Mars rather than cinder rather

that it might be
cinder to perpetuate size of it

I perpetuate Mars
it may not be it is

size cupped here I can
size cinder very much my Mars

to have been cupped as size
to fell it as it is and

size I cupped
size can if burden
(which is burden) is

burden size can burden me
one knows a size for Mars (if Mars
is Mars)

one is one knows
one knows this gamble:

Mars Mars gamble for Mars

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"