June 8, 2005
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Kernel of Eternity
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, ”immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of
unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and
has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares
about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of
mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his
creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and
enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure
on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”– Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”
– attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler
