...with Occam's old razor she could slit the throat of that idea. - John Crowley

When she [Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia] went to take the waters at Spa, he [René Descartes] wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections, because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. 'Which is not wasting time but using it well.

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

For it is in the passage-times that fall between ages — when the laws of an old world weaken and begin to fail and the laws of the new are not yet in force — that we are visited with the notion that time is malleable, that the future is up for shaping, that nothing is fixed: then we are brushed by that wing, and it is the only call we will get.