squaring the spiral

It’s Sunday evening and I still haven’t posted anything on the blog this weekend. I’ve been out and walked and taken pictures – it was the most glorious morning here today – but I haven’t written anything. There are too many impossible tasks to deal with at the moment and the words seem to have slipped through the cracks.

So, with impossible tasks in mind, I thought of squaring the circle, and from there it was a short jump to this photo:

And from there it’s a short jump onwards to an old poem which has appeared both here and elsewhere on the web before, but seems relevant enough to justify reposting:

Elliptical Thoughts

The lives of parallel lines are uneventful:
no sudden twists or unexpected turns disturb
their single track monotony. And yet they dream
of non-Euclidean space where rules are bent
and of that infinite horizon where, at last, they’ll coincide.

Concentric circles, on the other hand, have
no such hyperbolic hope. They know their limitations.
Destined to be solitary cranks, they circumlocate,
make roundabout excuses and observe their fellows
from a distance. They never socialise.