On Life:

Take a cubic meter of sea and you are guaranteed to get life.
Take a cubic meter of atmosphere and you are likely to get something living.
Take a cubic meter of space and most likely you will get nothing.

Three degrees of density.
All contain life, in exactly the same proportion to their scale.
The ocean is small, dense; life is concentrated.
The atmosphere is less dense but bigger; life is feathery, green, mobile,
but life within it is proportionately equal to that of the sea.
Space is less dense still, by a thousandfold; millionfold, billionfold
Its vastness may disguise the life within it to us,
But the universe is saturated with life
Exactly equal, proportionately, to the life within the sea and the air.

A poem I once worked hard to remember...all these years later (Jan 05, 05...12)

To outer senses there is peace, a dreamy peace on either hand
deep silence in the shadowy land, deep silence where the shadows cease
save for a call that echos shrill, from some lone bird, disconsolate
a corncrake calling to its mate, the answer from the windy hill
and suddenly the moon withdraws, its sickle from the lightening skies
and to its somber cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.

Back to my book and the poem is exactly...

To outer senses there is peace,
A dreamy peace on either hand,
Deep silence in the shadowy land,
Deep silence where the shadows cease.

Save for a cry that echoes shrill
From some lone bird disconsolate;
A corncrake calling to its mate;
The answer from the misty hill.

And suddenly the moon withdraws
Her sickle from the lightening skies,
And to her sombre cavern flies,
Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.
                     -Wilde

Picture Don Quixote elbowing Ahab aside to tackle Moby Dick himself.
A salad bowl helmet and sapling harpoon.

After pulling the little waterproof radio thing from the back shelf to downstairs, sourcing two screwdrivers and eventually freeing the catacombed aa's; stayed in by tiny little regular head screws the kind where the threads go on forever, finding four more batteries and blinding myself to reinsert them and those screws...I can now carry carefully my waterproof classical back up to the bath.