In Xanadu

 

As I've pursued this degree, the more aware I've become to how much of this we already do. We are constantly taking in information, and be it directly or indirectly, we are learning. An example off the top of my head, I was reading the book The River of Doubt, about Roosevelt adventure up an unnamed tributary of the Amazon River. The author Candice Millard wrote extensively for National Geographic, and much of the text was not just telling the story of a man fight to stay alive, but also about the environment that was slowly killing him. A single paragraph mentioned plant tendrils, those little spirally tentacle like reaches that are there to brace, support, and absorb the motions and strain of a growing plant. I have seen them, but never much thought of their purpose, I had only accepted it a simply was. It's like seeing something everyday, and suddenly the same thing looks entirely different. Like talking to someone, really just talking with someone you've only seen in the office everyday. Everything you know and have conceived of this individual, this thing is through mere impression. Suddenly, you can see the dynamic behavior of something, the years, and millennia of changes, failure, successes. Suddenly the smallest aspect of a single thing becomes something so much more. As individuals on this journey we are learning to navigate these triffids of knowledge in the world more effectively. We are garnering basic knowledge, and more so learning from each other. We are becoming the fames explorer Percy Fawcett, as we hack our paths through the thickest of distractions and ill, time consuming tasks. It is our job to harness the bounty of the diverse and plentiful realm and deliver it's bounty to a populous to efficiently learn what they so need. Let us boldly venture into the uncharted, let us collect, catalogue, note, and map. Let our struggles lead others to the riches they so seek.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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