No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory -Sarah Simons
Letter from Mrs. Alice Williams to the Mount Wilson Observatory
Auckland
Tuesday July 7th
Dr. Edison Petit Dr. Seth B. Nicholson
Dear Gentlemen,
Some weeks ago I wrote you a letter. Not yet having heard from you I was wondering if you received my letter I wrote you from Homai. Since, I have shifted from Homai, to Auckland. So I thought I would send you my new address. I want to tell you I am not after money & I am not a fraud. I believe I have some knowledge, which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again. Because if people hear talking they want stick, they go & do away with their selves. I have gone through frightful things still I go through it & I am beginning to get knowledge. I would write down & tell you what I no. But I would sooner wait till I hear from you. Because you are both strangers to me & my letter may go astray. When one writes one needs peace & quietness.
I have got half a house with another woman some years older. She will not let me sit quite a moment it is terrible she keeps wanting to no the ins & outs of everything. She keeps running up & down the stairs in & out of the doors slamming them about & keeps wanting to talk & keeps wanting me to get ready to go out. It is awful I don’t no whether I am standing on my head or feet & still I am going through that treatment I told you. At times something works my mouth to talk out loud & I have got to be careful of her hearing as she thinks I am mad, & makes all sorts of fun of me to people. So in a few weeks I may have a little house of my own, & in the meantime I may hear news of you people & then I will be able to sit down & write quietly without interference. You no yourself if people interfere with you can’t do your work properly. I do want to tell you something because the entrance into the other world is worked different to what you ever thought & you will get a shock. When I tell you I don’t want no money from you. It won’t do you no harm to have my knowledge. So I will now conclude hoping you gentlemen are living & in the very best of health as I hear that people are dying in America, with the very hot weather they are having.
I Remain Yours Sincerely
Alice Williams
Mrs. Alice May Williams
No. 18 Norman Street Rocky Nook off Dominion Rd
Auckland. NZ.
P.S. Please excuse writing & mistakes as this lady is worrying me to get ready to go out. Please keep my letters secret till I tell you what I no. Then you can do what you like. A.W.
In a closet size room called The Misch/Webster Gallery in a strange and wonderful place called The Museum of Jurassic Technology there are 33 letters presented as part of an exhibition entitled “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory”. The entire collection of letters allegedly sent to the Observatory between 1915 and 1935 are available through the Museum, compiled into a book, also titled No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again, my first recommendation to Artist’s Atheneum.
This publication was the first I purchased from the Museum after I became interested in it and its curator, David Wilson. Even after having read the other books published by and on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I remain defiantly unsure what to believe and hopeful that nutty turn of the century astronomy enthusiasts truly wrote these letters, rather than Wilson himself, so I may return to them again and again to re-experience the sense of wonder I need, sometimes desperately.
Collected Fictions -Borges, Jorge Luis
It was, I have to admit, through the Museum of Jurassic Technology and not some literature course, that I discovered Borges. Jorge L, Borges’s Collected Fictions, is recommended reading on the museum’s website, as well as my second recommendation for Artist’s Atheneum. My favorite of Borges’s stories engages the nature of space and time. Borges’s fiction does not depend on the illusion of reality we create in order to lead linear lives with a consistent personal narrative. “The Secret Miracle” gives a year of still time to a man standing before a firing squad, another forgets nothing he experiences in “Funes, the Memorious” and in “Aleph” everything in the universe can be seen from a single point in space. I believe reading Borges’s has helped me, in small ways, open my mind and work up to more illogical solutions.
The Elegant Universe: Super strings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory -Greene, B
My last recommendation for Artist’s Atheneum, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, grounds all this irrationality in fact, or, at least in math, which is close enough for me. But, I want to believe. Brian Greene thinks I might be a hologram and he debatably has the science to back it up. I recommended The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality because explains the wonders of Multiverse theory in a way a novice like me can understand, at least for brief moments using, for some reason, many references to The Simpsons.
Biography
Liz Sales is cataloged as a bibliographic items with International Center of Photography Library. A bibliographic item can be any information entity (e.g., books, computer files, graphics, realia, cartographic materials, or in Liz’s case, Liz) that is considered library material as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the patrons of the library in question.
Liz is the only human being recognized by the Library of Congress as a library holding and has an assigned Library of Congress and ISBN #.
For more information about Liz look up her library record at either WorldCat or go to The ICP Library and click on “search the Library’s online catalogue.”
Artist's Atheneum 