p. 195 Science is very conservative, and its stability rests on the idea that new understandings of the world must fit in with the previous knowledge about it. Biologist E. O. Wilson has used the term "consilience" to describe this, the "jumping together" of knowledge when facts and theories from different areas link and form a common foundation of knowledge. As he says, "the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another."
p. 224 The idea of the emotional connection, but not the roles, enduring across lifetimes can affect the way that parents look at their children, because it suggests that parents need to provide discipline for their children, not in a domineering or harsh way, but as guidance for fellow travelers. Children can be seen as equal partners sharing life's journey instead of inferior beings, even though they are partners that need direction and need to feel a sense of security that their parents are in control.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, r. Nov. 2015
p. 30 For someone used to the doldrums and ditchwater of latter-day academic writing, reading Gladstone's chapter on color comes as rather a shock - that of meeting an extraordinary mind. One is left in awe by the originiality, the daring, the razor-sharp analysis, and that breathless feeling that however fast one is trying to run through the argument in one's own mind, Gladstone is always two steps ahead, and, whatever objection one tries to raise, he has preempted several pages before one has even thought of it.
p. 202 Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it's the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.
p. 239 But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember tha you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.
p. 202 Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it's the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.
p. 239 But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember tha you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Is That A Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos, r. Nov. 2015
p. 145 When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance - when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits - you find resources in your language you never knew were there.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane, r. Oct. 2015
p. 52 The youth looked keenly at the ashen face [of the dead soldier]. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
p. 128 He did not give a great deal of thought to these battles that lay directly before him. It was not essential that he should plan his ways in regard to them. He had been taught that many obligations of a life were easily avoided. The lessons of yesterday had been that retribution was a laggard and blind. With these facts before him he did not dream it necessary that he should become feverish over the possibilities of the ensuing twenty-four hours. He could leave much to chance.
p. 199 A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.
p. 308 The autumn smote the leaves, and the trees of Whilomville were panoplied in crimson and yellow. The winds grew stronger, and in the melancholy purple of the nights the home shine of a window became a finer thing. The little boys, watching the sear and sorrowful leaves drifting down from the maples, dreamed of the near time when they could heap bushels in the streets and burn them during the abrupt evenings.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Pillar of Sand by Sandra Postel, r. Oct. 2015
p. 237 ...look for what works rather than what is theoretically correct, and do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale, r. Sep. 2015
p. 19 I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life
there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind
originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the
earth for the taking…
p. 77 Almost without noticing it, I slipped into the routine
that was to become my life. Early morning had a familiar sound for I was
regularly awakened by a rooster just before dawn. I would lie there relaxed for
a little, thinking how lucky I was to look forward to a day which was going to
bring me nothing but satisfaction.
p. 141 I remember thinking, too, how vastly different their
lives were going to be from mine once their pleasant cruise was over. Even when
they reached Apia in Samoa there would be bright lights (of a sort), cars, busy
streets, cinemas, hotels; so-called luxuries which, however desirable, exacted
their own price in tensions, problems, congested humanity.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, r. Sep. 2015
p. 16 Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
p. 54 Under a row of pear trees - once an orchard? - I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
p. 55 Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, 'If people praise you, you're not walking your own path.'
p. 61 I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. "Liberality? Timidity in the rich!" "Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed" "Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception." What sort of state does he want? "None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."
p. 75 Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
p. 86 Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye.
p. 177 I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
p. 225 I play Go against my sony, I said. "To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?" The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
p. 227 Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.
p. 235 the vacant (movie theater) was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite contured thru a lens when your grandfather's grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but [movies] enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces. Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say.
p. 265 So many feelin's I'd got I din't have room 'nuff for 'em. Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'ankin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
p. 303 So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized? List'n, savages and Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.
p. 326 All revolutions are [fantasy and lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
p. 331 Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata.
p. 344 My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
p. 349 As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
p. 362 She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
p. 363 It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
p. 387 ...but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
p. 449 ...nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. Can scarcely recall the name of a single sight. By the itinerary's finale, the great clock tower, my jaw was hurting from all the yawns I'd suppressed.
p. 470 People are obscenities. Would rather by music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
p. 54 Under a row of pear trees - once an orchard? - I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
p. 55 Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, 'If people praise you, you're not walking your own path.'
p. 61 I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. "Liberality? Timidity in the rich!" "Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed" "Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception." What sort of state does he want? "None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."
p. 75 Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
p. 86 Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye.
p. 177 I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
p. 225 I play Go against my sony, I said. "To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?" The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
p. 227 Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.
p. 235 the vacant (movie theater) was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite contured thru a lens when your grandfather's grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but [movies] enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces. Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say.
p. 265 So many feelin's I'd got I din't have room 'nuff for 'em. Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'ankin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
p. 303 So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized? List'n, savages and Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.
p. 326 All revolutions are [fantasy and lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
p. 331 Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata.
p. 344 My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
p. 349 As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
p. 362 She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
p. 363 It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
p. 387 ...but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
p. 449 ...nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. Can scarcely recall the name of a single sight. By the itinerary's finale, the great clock tower, my jaw was hurting from all the yawns I'd suppressed.
p. 470 People are obscenities. Would rather by music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
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