A Confused Vegetation*

So today, the Beckstar turned a Wednesday into Wednfunsday!!!! Let's pretend that wordplay worked nicely and move on.

While in Portland over the weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Powell's Books, which was just as comprehensive, enormous and treasure-filled as its reputation suggested.

If you get a chance to go, be sure to visit the Technical Books Store around the corner. It's full of scientific/applied/instructional/awesome things of all sorts. Like this Magic Garden I bought. I enjoyed its growth all through my workday!


9:15am - Where it all goes down.


9:25am - Secret solution added. Muah ha ha!


9:55am - Baby crystals are the cutest. Look at their miniature little geometries! Awwwwwwww!


11:40am - If I'm ever fired, I think I will meditate on this photo for a little while.


3:20pm - Or maybe this one.


5:00pm - The view from day's end. Sweet!

If I've learned anything in the years I've walked this Earth - it's that this was totally awesome.

*

I will never forget the sight. The crystallisation vessel in which it (the chemical garden) exhibited itself, was three quarters filled with slightly slimey water, namely dilute water glass, and out of the sandy bottom sprung a grotesque small landscape of differently coloured growths, a confused vegetation composed of blue, green and brown spikes, reminiscent of algae, fungi, sessile polyps, but also mosses, then shells, fruit, treelets or branches of trees, here and there even limbs – the strangest thing I had ever seen: strange, not so much because of the, albeit wonderful and confusing sight, but because of its deeply melancholy nature.

So goes the description of a chemical crystal garden from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in a scene which I want to read. According to my coworker, it is a horrifying scene in which the father torments his children by demanding they define the difference between the crystals and a living thing.