GIVING THANKS THAT WE ARE HERE. I posted here on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s observation that compared the probability of your being born to a speck of dust beside a planet a billion times bigger than the earth. We are all Black Swans. I think of the lines from Wallace Stevens that I quoted here as expressing the wonder of this:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.