A Toast to the Alchemists by Laura Gilpin

10/04/21 • 1 min

Alchemists, you were right, it is possible. We have the proof now. There are equations. If you could come back for a day, if you could conjure yourself into this chemistry classroom, if you could read the textbook or watch the professor writing the answers on the board Alchemists, you would see that you were right, even though you didn't know about alpha and beta radiation, even though you didn't understand isotopes, you knew it was possible, that some elements can change into other elements, that transmutation can occur. Alchemists, there is proof now that it is possible, although each new element, having a brief half-life, would keep changing into other things. Alchemists, you were right, you can make anything, anything, uranium, plutonium, tellurium, mercury, copper, cobalt, platinum, silver, and gold, you can make gold, an isotope so radioactive it would sparkle before your eyes. Alchemists, you were right. It is magic. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/i-talk-too-much/message

Previous Episode

Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/i-talk-too-much/message