A bit of non-photographic inspiration

Many years ago I had the honor of taking a college physics class from a professor named Mario Savio.  At the time he was quite a sight.  The man couldn't have looked the part any better.  He was probably in his 60's, tall and slight. His hair was a mix of white and gray and fell like a waterfall to his shoulders.  When he walked his mane looked like it was following him like a puppy.  But it turns out that this odd looking fellow had a rather interesting history.  He had been the lead figure of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the UC Berkeley.

I have a slight hero attraction toward certain types of characters.  I would put Mario Savio right up there on the top shelf along with Richard Feynman.  Both men were as well known for their non-physics activities as they were the physics (of course Feynman was a Nobel laureate).  In Mr. Savio's case he was a master orator.  I was awed by what I saw played out in the historic videos of the demonstrations.  There as a particular piece that has stuck with me for the last twenty years.  In this piece he talks about the University as a factory and how the students have the right to dissent and rise against the managers and board of directors.  Here's the passage:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (video)

I've carried this around with me since I first heard it.  Although it occasionally gets shuffled and lost or filed in the vaults and forgotten.  Then, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing really, I stumble across it again.  I think it's a great mantra for any movement where a limit has been reached and the status quo can no longer be tolerated.  I think we've all experienced this to some degree.

I had the luck to have had several personal discussions with Mr. Savio over the course of the semester I had his physics class.  We often talked about the ideal of the well-rounded scholar.  Until recently,  I've always had one foot in the technical/science world and one foot (more like a toe, actually) in the art world, with both feet separated by fear.  This condition has been the source of much internal strife, struggle, and self-examination. But I remember one conversation where he turned me on to this poem by Langston Hughes  --  A Dream Deferred.  Here's the poem:

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?

It's a great little bit of inspiration, a reminder of lost, shuffled, exiled, or mis-filed goals and dreams.  It's something I think about when I wonder if I'm doing the right thing (or what's right for me at least).   It was pinned to my cubical wall at several jobs.  I think it just might be pinned to my soul.