Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

(EDITOR'S NOTE:  Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen was a featured cover artist this in Wildlife Art Journal.  Read our feature story on his work, Canoeing With Alligators, and meantime enjoy this excerpt from Brest van Kempen's book Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding.)


By Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen

Last week the iron core of an ancient star collapsed, triggering an explosion that releases more energy with each millisecond than our solar system’s seen since the Middle Ages.  An instantaneous expulsion of superheated plasma disintegrated all matter in the relevant vicinity:  a disaster against which anything our puny planet has experienced pales pathetically.

It’s impossible for me to imagine an even of such magnitude, so I won’t try.  I don’t have to;  its effects will never be perceptible from this galaxy.  Besides, I have cataclysms of my own to content with.



Riparian Rashomon:  The same mortal scene from different perspectives


One of them occurred at the instant of the supernova.  It began with the sound of a doorbell.  My friend Lars stood at the stoop with an early draft of this text I had asked him to critque.  On the way over, he had stopped at a pet shop to buy one of those parakeet cuttlebones with a little bell on it.  Handing me my manuscript, then the cuttlebone, he said, “Clip this onto your mirror.  As long as you’re spending so much time looking at yourself, you might as well have some...