Word: ponds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Henderson's literal translation -"Old pond:/ frog jumpin/ water-sound" -mirrors the surface picture beneath which lies Poet Bashó's elusive hidden meaning...
Placid Space. The best way to think of space as a navigable medium is to imagine the frictionless surface of a calm, glassy pond. Small objects drift across it easily, propelled by feeble forces. Scattered at wide intervals over the mirror surfaces are deep, sucking whirlpools. If a floating leaf drifts close to one of them, it plunges down to the bottom. A self-powered object, say a water insect, that gets sucked into a whirlpool has a terrible time battling back to the surface...
Deep space, far from stars or planets, is like the pond's smooth surface. An object becalmed in its emptiness floats like a galleon in the doldrums. If the object is a spaceship with propulsive power, it can cruise in any direction, meeting practically no resistance. But it must keep away from the whirlpools: the gravitational fields that surround stars and planets. If it plunges into one of them, it may end as a puff of gas in a star or a brief streak of fire in a planet's atmosphere...
When Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Feininger at last came home to Manhattan, to sail his model boats on the pond in Central Park as he had as a boy, and to paint in the midst of war the most joyful canvases of his career. The school-of-Paris cubism he brought back with him helped free his individual genius: he took cubism out of doors, to church and to the beach, using it to animate a vista with the intricate counterpoint of a Bach fugue. Regatta, which seems as much like the gates of paradise as Pink...
...Walden Pond is a national shrine, as renowned as Mt. Rushmore or Buffalo Bill's Grave, and it should be kept free from the stench of the local refuse, if for no other reason, simply to preserve its attractiveness for the tourists of America who must have some place to drive to during vacation-time. Besides, modern techniques require big yellow bulldozers to ply dump areas throughout the day, and the continual pilgrimage of trucks and trailers, with the bulldozers snorting through the pines like prehistoric beasts, would be a grotesque way to shatter the placid hours of this venerable...