The Universe Is Made of Stories "The universe is made of stories not of atoms" says Muriel Rukeyser but each atom has a story to tell— Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen combined to form amino acids, building blocks of life whose stories are still ongoing ever evolving from the DNA double helix spiralling back to the first Adam. Can you hear the rhyme and rhythm of the Moon's double sonnet poem waxing and waning with the tides? The Earth has an anthology with scintillating short stories each told by those who lived here, and our Sun's epic is bolder than The Odyssey travelling around the Milky Way spanning 225 million years and your hair will stand on end when Sun recounts the marauding black hole swallowing up neighboring galaxies. Ask a Tibetan monk whose mind has propelled him back to the womb and beyond to his previous life or a Hua-Yen Buddhist who has seen tiers and tiers of universes in their recurring cycles of birth and death or some cosmic programmer who wrote this universe as a computer simulation that's played out as in The Matrix films. This universe has sextillion stories but there is one song yet to be sung— and that singer is you!         — Peter Y. Chou              Mountain View, 12-10-2010

© Stephen Gould: "Muriel Rukeyser Plaque", Library Walk, New York Public Library