Reading Billy Collins’s “The Trouble With Poetry” and thinking about how, as cliché as it sounds, the world is a realm of infinite possibilities. Not a place where “anything can happen,” but a place where both old and new things never stop happening.
Each one of us has an unnumbered and unnumberable amount of potential experiences — experiences both to have and to offer in the world. And those myriad experiences multiply exponentially with each encounter with another — exponential multiplicities which again and again multiply exponentially with each friendship. (And how much more so if we make those friendships with others who are not like us, who think and act and pray differently?)
This is what happens with one and then with two. And there are 8 billion of us, all bouncing our disparate and duplicate experiences off each other.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything in the world
and there is nothing left to do
but quitely close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.
The delightful sarcasm of Collins is always thick in substance and light in expression!