The angels are via a Dutch painter named Sittow who was new to me, the woman with the vase is via Alma-Ledema. It's almost as if they're a cult of floral worshipers, or it can be seen as a paean to virgnity. I like the former--what a nice idea of God as a bouquet of flowers.
Here's another:
"If the nucleus of an atom were a basketball located at the center of Earth, the electrons would be cherry pits whizzing about in the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. Between our nuclear [basketball] and the whizzing pits, there would be no Earth: no iron, nickel, magma, soil, sea, or sky, ... nothing, literally, to speak of. ... We live in a universe that is largely devoid of matter. Yet still the Milky Way glows, and still our hemoglobin flows, and when we hug our friends, our fingers don't sink into the vacuum with which all atoms are filled. If in touching their skin we are touching the void, why does it feel so complete?"
Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, pp. 85-86.
I find this idea of an opposition between a belief in God and faith in science increasingly absurd. What better evidence of the presence of some sort of Higher Power than that which allows us to touch and see each other when we are technically mostly matterless voids?
MCO 2008
I know they aren't daffodils, but your art has let the English teacher out to play.
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
William Wordsworth
I'll herd him up and bring him back in now.
Wow. I have to read Angier's book. Wow.
Love the Hy-Art and the idea of God as a bouquet of flowers.
I also love the Wordsworth poem that the previous commenter left.