Glass Mosaic Quotes

Everyone breathing is broken. Keep breathing light into them until the stained glass collage takes your breath away.

We could return from sand if we had to--form into a beautiful mosaic of glass that told our story in colors.

Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together

I think that I shall never know Why I am thus, and I am so. Around me, other girls inspire In men the rush and roar of fire, The sweet transparency of glass, The tenderness of April grass, The durability of granite; But me- I don't know how to plan it. The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock. They broke my heart, they stilled my song, And said they had to run along, Explaining, so to sop my tears, First came their parents or careers. But ever does experience Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense! Though she's a fool who seeks to capture The twenty-first fine, careless rapture, I must go on, till ends my rope, Who from my birth was cursed with hope. A heart in half is chaste, archaic; But mine resembles a mosaic- The thing's become ridiculous! Why am I so? Why am I thus?

Everyone moves around me these days like I’m made of glass. Like one wrong look and I’ll shatter. Little do they know that it’s too late . . . All of me already is all shattered. A mosaic of cracks and agony.

We're all mosaics no one sees.

like a bright chip of glass, fallen from a gorgeous mosaic of Elderlings and turreted cities and dragons on the wing, to lie in the dirt, broken away from all she that had once been her destiny

I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.

There is good even in church people. You find it hard to believe, right? Jesus never shut the door on religious people. He just made sure that they understand He was that door, and not their deeds and tasks. Some of us, even I, need to be reminded of this. This being understood, the people of the church are like broken pieces of glass fixed into beautiful mosaic to reflect Jesus. The picture is beautiful, but the pieces do indeed still have sharp edges that can cut.

These days, I’m happy to report, I don’t have to work so hard. I’ve come to accept that my version of love is a mosaic: tiny pieces of broken glass held together by fate so the light can shine through in different colors. It is not perfect. Perfect, I’m afraid, is far too tame. The purest love is not born from bliss. It is pulled from the pyre. It is fierce and shape-shifted, slightly twisted and delicious. Accepting, forgiving, understanding, and relatably flawed, my type of love is the furthest thing from perfect. The closest thing to me.

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst.

Floor-to-ceiling picture windows were filled with the nighttime vista of the gleaming cities of El Paso and Juarez, obscured by large patches of human skin pasted to the glass like self-clinging decals. The odd angles and random placement looked like a macabre Picasso mosaic.

Day and far into the opalescent Embelyon night [Turjan of Miir] worked under Pandelume's unseen tutelage. He learned the secret of renewed youth, many spells of the ancients, and a strange abstract lore that Pandelume termed 'Mathematics.' "Within this instrument," said Pandelume, "resides the Universe. Passive in itself and not of sorcery, it elucidates every problem, each phase of existence, all the secrets of time and space. Your spells and runes are built upon its power and codified according to a great underlying mosaic of magic. The design of this mosaic we cannot surmise; our knowledge is didactic, empirical, arbitrary. Phandaal glimpsed the pattern and so was able to formulate many of the spells which bear his name. I have endeavored through the ages to break the clouded glass, but so far my research has failed. He who discovers the pattern will know all of sorcery and be a man powerful beyond comprehension.

Fragment" What is poetry? Is it a mosaic Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought Into a pattern? Rather glass that's taught By patient labor any hue to take And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught, Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught With storied meaning for religion's sake.

By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders. Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

Holy s——!” someone shouted from outside. A few guests reacted with good-natured titters. The children hardly noticed, they were so absorbed in their music. The song ended. All the little eyes were on Mr. Kangana, who counted them into their next song, “One, two, three—” “F——!” someone else shouted. This was not OK. I dashed through the laundry room to the back door, with the intention of shushing the raucous caterers. I turned the handle. A strong, dull, consistent pressure pushed the door toward me. Immediately sensing a terrible force of nature on the other side, I attempted to close the door. The inhuman force wouldn’t allow it. I stuck my foot against the bottom of the door. I heard an ominous creak. The hinges began pulling loose from the frame. Before I could compute any of this, the marimba music suddenly stopped. A series of pops and pings erupted from the sunroom. A child squealed in distress. I abandoned the threat at the door and hurtled to the sunroom, where I was met by the shattering of glass. The children were running, screaming, from their instruments. With none of their own parents to run to for comfort, the kindergarteners collectively burrowed into the crowd of prospective parents, who in turn were trying to squeeze through the one small door leading to the living room. It’s a small miracle nobody was trampled. My daughter, Ginny, ran to me and hugged my legs. Her back was wet… and muddy. I looked up. The shades were now eerily raised of their own accord. And then came the mud. In it sloshed, through the broken windows. Thick mud, watery mud, rocky mud, mud with beveled-glass shards, mud with window muntins, mud with grass, mud with barbecue utensils, mud with a mosaic birdbath. In a flash, the sunroom windows were gone, and in their place, a gaping, mud-oozing hole.

Nonna tucked each of her hands into the opposite sleeve, a wizened Confucius in a leopard bathrobe. "Michelangleo, he goes. For days and days he stays away from Elisabetta. The other girls, the prettier girls, have hope again. And then, there he goes once more, carrying only his nonno's ugly old glass-his telescope-and a bag of figs. These he lays at her feet. "'I see you,' he tells her. 'Every day for months, I watch. I see you. Where you sit, the sea is calm and dolphins swim near you. I see your mended net looks like a lady's lace. I see you dance in the rain before you run home. I see the jewel mosaic you leave to be scattered and remade again and again, piu bella than gold and pearls. You are piu bella than any other, queen of the sea. "'You do not need silk or pearls. I see that. But they are yours if you wish. I am yours if you wish.If you like what you see.' He gives her the glass. She takes it. Then she asks, 'What about the figs? My bisnonno, he laughs. 'It might take time, your looking to see if you like me. I bring lunch.'" Nonna slapped her knee again, clearly delighted with little Michelangelo's humor. "There is the love story. You like it?" I swallowed another yawn. "Si, Nonna.It's a good story." I couldn't resist. "But...a talking seagull? A dolphin guide? That kinda stretches the truth, dontcha think?" Nonna shrugged. "All truth, not all truth, does it matter? My nonno Guillermo came to Michelangelo and Elisabetta, then my papa Euplio to him, then me, your papa, you." She lowered her feet to the floor. Then pinched my cheek. Hard. Buona notte, bellissima." "Okay,Nonna." I yawned and pulled the white eyelet quilt up.I'd inked abstract swirl-and-dot patterns all over it when I redecorated my room. They're a little optic when I'm that tired. "Buona notte." As I was dozing off,I heard her rummaging in the linen cupboard next to my door. Reorganizing again, I though. She does that when Mom can't see her. They fold things completely different ways.

Kaleidoscope Yoga: The universal heart and the individual self. We, as humanity, make up together a mosaic of beautiful colors and shapes that can harmoniously play together in endless combinations. We are an ever-changing play of shape and form. A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other’s alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that’s for everyone to enjoy... Coming into a practice and an energy field of community yoga over and over, is a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment, to the person in front of you, to the people around you, to your body, to others’ bodies, to your energy, to others’ energy, to your breath, to others’ breath. [...] community yoga practice can help us, in a very real, practical, grounded, felt, somatic way, to identify and be in harmony with all that is around us, which includes all of our fellow human beings.
 We are all multiple selves. We are all infinite. We are all universal selves. We are all unique expressions of the universal heart and universal energy. We are all the universal self. We are all one another. And we are all also unique specific individuals. And to the extent that we practice this, somatically, we become more and more comfortable and fluid with this larger, more cosmic, more inter-related reality. We see and feel and breathe ourselves, more and more, as the open movement of energy, as open somatic possibility. As energy and breath. This is one of the many benefits of a community yoga practice. Kaleidoscope shows us, in a very practical way, how to allow universal patterns of wisdom and interconnectedness to filter through us. [...] One of the most interesting paradoxes I have encountered during my involvement with the community yoga project (and it is one that I have felt again and again, too many times to count) is the paradox that many of the most infinite, universal forms have come to me in a place of absolute solitude, silence, deep aloneness or meditation. And, similarly, conversely and complimentarily, (best not to get stuck on the words) I have often found myself in the midst of a huge crowd or group of people of seamlessly flowing forms, and felt simultaneously, in addition to the group energy, the group shape, and the group awareness, myself as a very cleanly and clearly defined, very particular, individual self. These moments and discoveries and journeys of group awareness, in addition to the sense of cosmic expansion, have also clarified more strongly my sense of a very specific, rooted, personal self. The more deeply I dive into the universal heart, the more clearly I see my own place in it. And the more deeply I tune in and connect with my own true personal self, the more open and available I am to a larger, more universal self. We are both, universal heart and universal self. Individual heart and individual self. We are, or have the capacity for, or however you choose to put it, simultaneous layers of awareness. Learning to feel and navigate and mediate between these different kinds and layers of awareness is one of the great joys of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga, and of life in general. Come join us, and see what that feels like, in your body, again and again. From the Preface of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga: The Art of Connecting: The First 108 Poses

Raised in the Episcopal church, I was once removed from my pew, at age six, because I could not control my weeping. Unbeknownst to anyone, I had been staring at a terrible, glorious stained-glass window of the crucifixion and grieving for the pain Christ must have endured. The arresting mosaic of that forlorn image etched itself indelibly upon me. And yet at some point, I became emotionally and empathically detached.

Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discover more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil, into certain regularities. Their labour will not be in vain. These regularities will in fact ‘work’; they will cover most of the facts. But if they go on to conclude that any departure from them would be unworthy of the painter, and an arbitrary breaking of his own rules, they will be far astray. For the regularities they have observed never were the rule the painter was following. What they painfully reconstruct from a million dots, arranged in an agonising complexity, he really produced with a single lightning-quick turn of the wrist, his eye meanwhile taking in the canvas as a whole and his mind obeying laws of composition which the observers, counting their dots, have not yet come within sight of, and perhaps never will".

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds—the revelation—have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn’t it art, I thought—as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire—that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word.

I’ve always been awed by the interior of the cathedral. It’s breathtaking, ethereal. Ridged, marble columns run the length of the walls, interspersed with stained glass windows boasting colorful mosaics made of stained glass accented with gold leaf.

They’d left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire sands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.

I love the church. I like the waxed candles that remind me people think of people. I love the bouquet of flowers on the altar that a group of grandmas grow in their gardens and pridefully donate every week. I admire the wooden statues of craftsmanship, of a mother staring at you with the kind of pure, loving look I forgot to ask from mine. I like the skinny man nailed to the cross reminding me that people are capable of sacrificial love. I like to stare at the art on the stained-glass windows, of angels, of lambs, and of fruit. I love running my hands over mosaics and tracing the lips of saints. I love the hymns and joy of the choir, who sing regardless if you’re too scared. I love watching the collective sway of bodies subconsciously comforted by their environment after finally saying “Peace be with you.” And most of all, I love being surrounded by people trying. They wear Christ around their neck and squeeze a rosary for dear life, admitting their weaknesses and sins. Tell me, where do you find that? There is an honesty in the church, spilling from kneeling persons, that gives me the hope humans can take care of each other and our planet can be a good one. Where else can I be exposed to the practice of morality on such an emotional level? I love everything about the church—the shiny pews, the smoky incense, the Bible and its purpose – because when all is considered, it makes sense. It is a template of discipline and thoughtfulness. Why call religious people idiots when they’re the few paying attention to their own lives? And there are other ways to be moral of course, but not many ways to practice. I’ve learned that to believe in God doesn’t subtract any life from you. It is additional. It is the world and God. If someone wears a jacket over their shirt, they aren’t naked. They’re double-layered.

But not necessarily! Look, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plain. Dust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnot. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that’s not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that’s always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it.

I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.” Edie

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries not to give in to any seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil, He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted and sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he stands face to face with a beautiful woman his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy, I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfillmy own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds 1983 Drama

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries hard not to give in to any form of seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil? He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted when he sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he comes face to face with a beautiful woman, his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy? I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and as well Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfil my own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds . 1983 Drama

You are not who you think you are. There are things buried inside you that whisper. They give you words you speak as your own, and they nudge you, lead you, seduce you into thoughts they want you to have. You have formed decisions from their memories and acted from their grievances. They are ghosts that live within you, peeking out from your eyes. They squat in your skin, clouding and morphing what you think, what you see, what you feel. You are, quite simply, not just you. Rather, you are a haphazard, haunted mosaic of a hundred shards of glass. A physical treasure box of experienced lifetimes. A sea of souls trapped in flesh. The fragmented remains of others past live within you. And if you aren’t careful, like a puppeteer to a marionette, they will twitch, and you will move.

His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. [...] And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment.

We put our shoes away. I had already purchased the necessary accouterments at the convenience store across the street—shampoo, soap, scrubbing cloth, and towels—and handed Tatsu what he needed as we went in. We paid the proprietor the government-mandated and subsidized four hundred yen apiece, walked up the wide wooden stairs to the changing area, undressed in the unadorned locker room, then went through the sliding glass door to the bath beyond. The bathing area was empty—peak time would be in the evening—and, like the locker room, spartan in its unpretentiousness: nothing more than a large square space, a high ceiling, white tile walls dripping with condensation, bright fluorescent lighting, and an exhaust fan on one wall that seemed to have given up on its long battle with the steam within. The only concession to an aesthetic not strictly utilitarian was a large, brightly colored mosaic of Ginza 4-chome on the wall above the bath itself.

The floor is a fifteenth-century revival of medieval Cosmatesque mosaic style. The Cosmati family developed their unmistakable technique in Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This decorating style was a fantasy of geometric shapes and swirls in cut pieces of colored glass and marble (much of which was “recycled” from pagan Roman palaces and temples). Stunning examples of authentic Cosmati floors and decorations can be found in some of the oldest and most beautiful churches, basilicas, and cloisters in Rome and southern Italy.

Instead of canals, a magical four-story central courtyard faces the interior walls. A greenhouse of sorts. The roof is glass and the floor is a sensuous garden filled with freestanding columns, whimsical twelfth-century lion stylobates, and all manner of statuary. A Roman mosaic sits at the center, surrounded by an ever-changing installation of flowers and shrubs. A pair of towering palm trees reach up to the sunlight, climbing beyond the third floor.

There is traditional mosaic work and glazed tiles in geometric designs, but there is also a smattering of Western consumer goods: ‘several fine European pier glasses with very handsome hangings’ in the royal apartments, for instance, and ‘in each room is a fine gilt branch for wax candles’.60 This is not a straightforward act of emulation of Western tastes, however. In Islamic tradition, light possesses a divine quality as the visible manifestation of God’s presence and reason. As he consistently tries to do, Sidi Muhammad has borrowed from the West with

We went back to the ballroom we had passed through earlier. I recognized it by the gilt moldings on the walls, for in the darkness I could not see the ceiling-- and the floor was utterly changed. Gone were the mosaics; gone was the floor. Instead, still water filled the room from end to end, deep blue with white-gold glitters swirling above the water were tiny pinpricks of light. "It's beautiful," I whispered. Shade caught my hand again and drew me forward. I followed him two halting steps, expecting my feet to splash into the water-- but instead the soles of my feet touched something cool, firm, and smooth, like glass. I looked down: the water rippled around our feet but held our weight. So we walked to the center of a midnight lake and watched the lights swirl around us like a flock of birds.

Day and night, I was free to explore the house-- and I went everywhere that I could, for my key opened almost half the doors. I found a rose garden under a glass dome; the roses formed a labyrinth in which I always got lost, and yet-- according to the cuckoo clock at the door-- I would always stumble out again in exactly twenty-three minutes. I found a greenhouse full of potted ferns and orange trees. The air was thick with the warm, wet smell of earth. Bees hummed through the air; the glass walls were frosted with condensation. I found a round room whose walls were covered in mosaics of naiads and tossing waves, and the air always smelled of salt, and no matter which way I turned, the door was always directly behind me.

Poison? A slow death twitching and puking on the Arch Lector’s lovely mosaic floor? Or just pitching onto my face on his table? But there was really no option but to grasp the glass and take a hearty swig. The

It didn’t occur to either of us that the worlds we offered one another were false, mosaics constructed of only the most appealing shards of glass.

All science, like all religion, like most history, like philosophy and probably all great art, addresses a set of universal, enduring questions: how did we get here? Why are things as they are? Where are we going? What does it all mean? Is there an ultimate purpose to our existence, or is what we can see around us just the result of a horrible accident, or a sublime one? What science--and in this story, physics--does is take a little piece of one of those questions and, systematically and provisionally, deliver an answer. This answer on its own may help nobody and answer nothing. But physics goes on to another little question within that bigger question, and then another and then another, and sooner or later, the mosaic of little answers starts to deliver something of more substance: a pattern, a direction of travel, a model that seems to make sense. Actually, substance might not be the right word: we can never be sure that what we see is reality: we may be observing a mirage, or a reflection of reality, or just the silhouette of reality, as if a figure through an opaque glass door,