My Virtual Reading Room

A bit of humour from one of the masters  of the genre...

Enjoy!
Cat

THE ANT

The ant has made himself illustrious
Though constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?

LINES FRAUGHT WITH NAUGHT BUT THOUGHT

If you thirst to know who said, "I think, therefore I am," your thirst I will quench;
It was Rene' Descartes, only what he actually said was, "Je pense, donc je suis," because he was French.
He also said it in Latin, "Cogito, ergo sum,"
Just to show that he was a man of culture and not a tennis tramp or a cracker barrel philosophy bum.
Descartes was one of the few who think, therefore they are,
Because those who don't think, but are anyhow, outnumber them by far.

If of chaos we are on the brink
It is because so many people only think that they think.
In truth, of anything other than thinking they are fonder,
Because thought requires the time and effort to reflect, cogitate, contemplate, meditate, ruminate, and ponder.
Their minds are exposed to events and ideas but they have never pondered and reflected on them
Any more than motion picture screens meditate on the images that are projected on them.

Hence, our universal confusion,
The result of the unreasoned, or jumped at, conclusion,
People who just think that they think, they secretly think that thinking is grim,
And they excuse themselves with signs reading, THIMK, or as Descartes would have said, PEMSEZ, and THINK OR THWIM.
Instead of thoughts, they act on hunches and inklings,
Which are not thoughts at all, only thinklings.
Can it be because we leave to the Russians such dull pursuits as thinking that the red star continues to twinkle so?

I thinkle so.

(Ogden Nash)