Paraphrasing Pessoa

Perhaps nothing matters more now to our universe than dark matter .

Just thinking about dark matter is the way I now use much of my time. It seems I’ve become obsessed with dark matter, and I’m not the only one.

There once was a time I thought about art much more than I thought about dark matter. I came to the conclusion then that everything in art, when it is art, is related to something else that is also art; that’s the way art works.

Therefore, I thought, that no matter how dark dark matter is dark matter must be remarkable, being as it is so very dark!

I wish I could see dark matter, often referred to as dark energy. Dark matter is supposed to constitute 95% of the total mass-energy content of the universe.

The Milky Way—and in fact our entire galactic neighborhood known as the Local Group—appear to be lodged in a vast, extended “sheet” of dark matter flanked on each side by cosmic voids*

Yesterday, Bill Mohr, my compatriot in such things, and I independently discovered we are on parallel paths toward our understanding of dark matter, and that it’s likely that I understand dark matter one way and he understands it another. To say that either of us understands dark matter is to also understand the beloved poet Pessoa who once celebrated “the good health of understanding nothing.”

*Our Entire Galaxy Appears to Be Embedded in a Colossal Sheet of Dark Matter (from Futurism, a newsletter article titled ‘Holy Sheet’ by Contributing Writer Frank Landymore, tech and science correspondent, published January 31, 2026).

Ocean Beach, San Francisco, February 3, 2026. Photo by author.