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Quote by Anton Sammut

“In the following days the twins went all over the city; they visited more museums, particularly the avant-garde ones. Whenever Magda spotted a Van Gogh her eyes would fill with tears, remembering the aberrational agony this great artist had gone through. The work that stirred her most was one of those many self-portraits of the artist in a sober and tormented mood; a painting built by many heavy brushstrokes of dense undiluted paint applied spirally giving the impression that the image was materializing from a turquoise background. Magda spent a full ten minutes before one such portrait. When she returned back to earth she noticed a young man beside her, as absorbed with the painting as she was and whose face looked familiar.”

Quote by Anton Sammut

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Memories of Recurrent Echoes

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Anton Sammut

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“Era deopotrivă o consolare și o mare tristețe să te simți atât de diferit de ceilalti oameni. Își coborî spre ei ochii spălăciți. Valul de mașini nu mai contenea, iar figurile sumbre și îngrijorate semănau toate între ele. Biata specie! Ce-o preocupa? Ce va mânca, ce va bea? El se gândea la catedrala din Rouen, la castelele de pe Loare, la Luvru. Una singură dintre aceste pietre venerabile face cât o mie de vieți omenești.”

“The Louvre’s much restored three wings or pavilions, the Sully, Denon, and Richelieu, were once the galleries where courtiers enjoyed royal hospitality and entertainments (and The Princesse de Clèves her secret surges of immoral passion). On a quiet un-crowded evening visit to the Louvre, it’s easy to imagine the masked and dancing couples in these pavilions, the rustle of silk, the whisperings of lovers, the royal entourage. The Louvre’s art collection was the result of François I’s enterprising enthusiasm for Italian art. He imported masterpieces by Uccello, Titian, Giorgione, and, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci himself, whose Mona Lisa—La Joconde in French—was and remains the most valued painting in the royal collection. Montaigne does not mention the paintings or the Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini whom François also imported to help transform gloomy Paris into a city of bright and saucy opulence.”

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“[w]hat he had failed to take into account was the impact (...) of seeing the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre lit up at night for the very first time. True, Sophia had seen them the day before (...) but just as the Count had imagined, she had seen them through the window of a bus. It was a different thing altogether to see them at the onset of summer having received an ovation, changed one's appearance, and escaped into the night. For while in the classical tradition there was no muse of architecture, I think we can agree that under the right circumstances the appearance of a building can impress itself upon one's memory, affect one's sentiments, and even change one's life. Just so, risking minutes that she did not have to spare, Sophia came to a stop at the Place de la Concorde and turned slowly in place, as if in a moment of recognition.”

“We use the effect of centrifugal forces on matter to offer insight into the rotation rate of extreme cosmic objects. Consider pulsars. With some rotating at upward of a thousand revolutions per second, we know that they cannot be made of household ingredients, or they would spin themselves apart. In fact, if a pulsar rotated any faster, say 4,500 revolutions per second, its equator would be moving at the speed of light, which tells you that this material is unlike any other. To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a hundred million elephants into a Chapstick casing. To reach this density, you must compress all the empty space that atoms enjoy around their nucleus and among their orbiting electrons. Doing so will crush nearly all (negatively charged) electrons into (positively charged) protons, creating a ball of (neutrally charged) neutrons with a crazy-high surface gravity. Under such conditions, a neutron star’s mountain range needn’t be any taller than the thickness of a sheet of paper for you to exert more energy climbing it than a rock climber on Earth would exert ascending a three-thousand-mile-high cliff. In short, where gravity is high, the high places tend to fall, filling in the low places—a phenomenon that sounds almost biblical, in preparing the way for the Lord: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain” (Isaiah 40:4). That’s a recipe for a sphere if there ever was one. For all these reasons, we expect pulsars to be the most perfectly shaped spheres in the universe.”

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