Thursday, December 8, 2011

everything there is to be known


Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge 
and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, 
you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. ― A.A. Milne

Scioto River view from the Dublin bridge 
Dublin, Ohio

23 comments:

  1. What a lovely, haunting photograph!

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  2. This river looks so ominous...dark, muddy, mysterious. I'm sure it has many stories to tell, just like you. Wishing you a happy holiday. Has it snowed there yet? We are so dry here but cold and getting colder every day.

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  3. As a child, I used to sit on bridges and just watch. Just today I did this again, for the first time in a long, long time, and I think there is something to that quote.

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  4. Indeed there is, Tom...indeed there is. Beautiful, Tess.

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  5. Perhaps that's true of paying careful, close, rapt attention to anything. It opens us to all life. Powerful photo.

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  6. Tess, your photograph prompted me to think of the following quote.

    “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” - Marcus Aurelius

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  7. I love the dark, murky feel of this photo. It says melancholy to me.

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  8. The sepia quality of this photograph makes it seem very old as well as contemporary. Timeless.

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  9. I cross the Dublin bridge over the Scioto a lot...the beautiful thing about the river is that it never looks the same...I take drive-by shots every time I cross...like some kind of wacky tourist...

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  10. Amazing river photo and the perfect quote to go with it.

    I have the Red River here in Louisiana. It's as much a part of me as my blood & my heartbeat.

    I read an amazing, funny, heart-rending memoir by Chris Offutt, "The Same River Twice" and there's a quote in the beginning which your post reminded me of. Thankfully, I knew right where the book was to go fetch it. :-)

    "I forget the names of towns without rivers.
    A town needs a river to forgive the town.
    Whatever river, whatever town---
    It is much the same.
    The cruelest things I did, I took to the river.
    I begged the current: make me better." ~Richard Hugo, "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry With Us"

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  11. now there was a genius... I play 'pooh sticks' every day when i cross over my local river bridge and never get tired... lovely thought x

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  12. Absolutely beautiful. Thank you for this.

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  13. That is beautiful. Great shot.

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  14. Philip K Dick came up with a curse in one of his fantasies: 'The Curse of All Knowledge'. Once you received this curse, you turned into dust and blew away with the wind.

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  15. Marion, that is beautiful...I'm scribbling it down in my little notebook...thank you...

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  16. Tom, my favorite curse is from the movie "I Know Where I'm Going"...

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  17. Nice shot.

    Knowing my luck, I don't stand on the bottom rail of bridges and lean over. The bridge would inevitabley slip slowly away beneath me and I'd end up in the river. Hence my lack of knowledge.

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  18. Or even sit on a wooden bridge over a creek at your grandmother's house in the mountains...

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  19. I'm with Dom.... bridges for me mean Pooh Sticks. Give me a slow flowing river, and a couple of sticks, and I'm as happy as Larry.

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  20. Dear Tess: Exquisite photo; very professional quality; if I may say; it has an archival quality to it...and the A.A. Milne (is this quote from Winnie The Pooh)so perfectly conscious in the now of beingness!

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  21. That stillness associated with the quite flowing river far from the worldliness, quitens the mind and one with eternity all becomes.

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Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.
― O. Henry (and me)