Everything you don’t understand is magic … When you understand things, there’s no more magic.
—
Wisdom from Tim Berners-Lee, echoing other great minds from Rilke to Feynman to Asimov. (via explore-blog)
See: electricity, glass, photosynthesis, etc., etc.
(via thelifeguardlibrarian)
*****
I actually disagree. I have never, ever understood this mindset.
I understand all that stuff…and yet it is still gorgeously unbefuckinglievable to me.
Light bulbs, music, rainbows, computers…I understand it, but yet when I actually try to think about it, I still wind up just shaking my head in astonishment.
There have been nights, I swear, at work, setting up for a recital or something, when after I’ve set the stage and uncovered the piano, I just stand there looking at it, under the lid, all the strings and pegs and keys, totally befuddled at this feat of human engineering and drive to create beauty.
Or…I was in the American Museum of Natural History one day with my aunt; we’d gone to see the “Extreme Mammals” exhibit. And we saw a little prehistoric adorable thing—the smallest mammal believed to have ever existed—and then an apatosaurus skeleton—and the little prehistoric shrew, its entire body was smaller than the smallest bone of the dinosaur. And next to the remains of some extremely weird-looking, huge, bony plated fish, I was like “Just think about the fact that we share an ancestor with that thing.”
Nope. For me, when you really, really understand something, is when it’s most magical.
(Source: , via themonicabird)
