وَمَن هابَ أَسبابَ المَنايا يَنَلنَهُ
وَلَو نالَ أَسبابَ السَماءِ بِسُلَّمِ

وَمَن يَعصِ أَطرافَ الزُجاجِ فَإِنَّهُ
يُطيعُ العَوالي رُكِّبَت كُلَّ لَهذَمِ

— معلقة زهير بن أبي سُلمى

الزِّجاج: جمع زُجِّ الرمح؛ وهو الحديد المركّب في أسفله. واللَّهْذَم: السِّنانُ الطويل [في أعلى الرمح]. وعاليةُ الرمح: ضدّ سافلته، والجمع: العَوالي.

إذا التقت فئتان من العرب سَدّدَت كلّ واحدةٍ منهما زِجاجَ الرِّماح نحو صاحبتها، وسعى الساعون في الصلح؛ فإنْ أبَتا إلا التمادي في القتال، قَلَبَ كلٌّ منها الرماحَ واقتَتَلَتا بالأسنّة.
يقول: ومن عصى أطراف الزِّجاج، أطاعَ عوالي الرماح، التي رُكِّبَت فيها الأسنّة الطِوال. وتحرير المعنى: من أبى الصلح ذلَّلَتهُ وليَّنَته الحرب.

— شرح الزوزني للمعلقات السبع

تشريح الرمح

"Spherical bastard", I like that

A maze has many paths and challenges you to find the exit.
A labyrinth has one path and draws you toward its center.
One is a puzzle designed to challenge and amuse. The other is an exercise designed to calm down the mind.

Labyrinths have served a variety of ritual and religious purposes over the millennia, from traps for evil spirits, to burial grounds, to crucibles of personal transformation and symbols of the path to salvation.

Life was not simple. If, one day, man would dare construct an architecture corresponding to the nature of the soul, that architect would have to take the labyrinth as the model.

.

وَإِنّي لَمِن قَومٍ كَأَنَّ نُفوسَنا
بِها أَنَفٌ أَنْ تَسكُنَ اللَّحمَ وَالعَظما

إِلى كَم ذا التَخَلُّفُ وَالتَواني
وَكَم هَذا التَمادي في التَمادي

وَشُغلُ النَفسِ عَن طَلَبِ المَعالي
بِبَيعِ الشِعرِ في سوقِ الكَسادِ

وَما ماضي الشَبابِ بِمُستَرَدٍّ
وَلا يَومٌ يَمُرُّ بِمُستَعادِ

I've been forwarding a lot of my old posts nowadays, which reminded me of this:

What do they call the feeling of nostalgia for an "imagined" perfect past, not even a real one?

On a second thought, almost all nostalgia is a longing for an imagined past, not a real one.
The perfect past is only perfect as a past. It's perfect in memory but not in reality; as something we can look at from a distance. Just as we enjoy war movies because we're watching them through a screen, and not actually living through the war.

I guess nostalgia is simply: The past, beautified and reimagined. By feeling nostalgic, we create a myth of a blissful past so we can distract ourselves from the imperfect present.

I would like to add this:
The business of nostalgia; reinventing the past, embellishing dead moments, and engineering memories is either done by broken-heart lovers or by broken-will politicians. Either way, it brings nothing but more breakage, fever dreams, and hopeless yearning.

I genuinely can't remember if I wrote it or stumbled upon it somwhere

An entire E. coli cell is shown here (10,000 X). The boxed, colored area is enlarged in the next illustration: