TITLE: Brief Flashes of Understanding, Fully Awake
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 10, 2012  2:54 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
The programmers and teachers among you surely know this
feeling well:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
As I drift back to sleep, I can't help thinking that it's
a wonderful thing to be right about the world.  To weigh
the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the
whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize
its beauty, its simplicity, its truth.  It's as close as
we get to God in this life, and we reside in the glow of
such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake,
sometimes, for two or three seconds, at peace with our
existence.  And then we go back to sleep.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Or tackle the next requirement.

(The passage is from Richard Russo's <EM>Straight Man</EM>,
an enjoyable send-up of modern man in an academic life.)
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