The Most Difficult Subjects

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

Unbending the Curve

"Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent -- an asymptote -- a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight line -- the wisest of all lines."

Theodore Meets the Milky Way

Theodore, beloved of God and a contented man,
Was reading his slender volume of visible light

When, like a dreamer startled from his dream,
He was struck by some unsettling thoughts

"There is more here, much more than I can understand
Things that I cannot even imagine perhaps

More than the storms of distant atmospheres
The bits of failed planets that circle the sun
The dormant seeds of heaven
The spectral lights of ancient gods
Things within and beyond my little bag of metaphors.

Even my equations that reveal so much without words
They confirm my suspicions:
The opposite of ignorance is not knowledge, but humility.
Awake, the empty spaces of creation arrange themselves."

Boat Slips

Across the transoms
The quiet voices of men
At work on things they love.

Dedicated to Unhappiness

"There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction."

Misgivings

"I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings."

Misleading Notes to Myself

One life is fragile. Life itself is not. Life continues deep within the earth and inbetween the stars.

***

Thomas Pynchon: a seriously talented writer determined not to take his talent too seriously for too long.

***

Pynchon's Inherent Vice: Shaggy grows up, ditches Scooby-Doo and the gang, goes public with his drug use, changes his name to Sportello, and becomes a private detective in L.A.

***

Every respiration is a part of the same process that moves the planets and illuminates the stars. Being is creation.

***

God is one of the ways we attempt to understand what is beyond our understanding.

Evil

"There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there's no reason not to."

Intolerance and Bigotry

"There may have been a time when it was commonly in the interests of political leaders to stoke their people's intolerance and bigotry to the point of international strife. This time is passing."

Idolatry

"In some respects, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers' program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult; a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen; and a centralized state with a single, national shrine. The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology. You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a scared "center, as of old, was merely a house of prayer.

But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists' reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk's power had always been challenged by Tiamat's, Baal's by Mot's. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite -- an image, an ideology, or a polity -- is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous."

Everything About Literature

“Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. . . .It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.”

High Treason of the Full Moon

(contra Richard Dawkins in a variation on a popular tune)

How can I tell you how I feel when I don't know?
Words have no meaning in a language from so long ago.

Are you the uncreated guide
Or songs of children who have died?
Is it love or is it pride
That needs an art it knows has lied?

Tonight, I dare define
Your face as one divine
The moon is something more than just its glow.

Save us both some time
Just give me a sign
Give me something more than just a show.

Now that an age draws to an end you cannot leave me.
I was not made to believe in something I can’t see.

You must have a face
We cannot embrace
A cosmic plan of transcendental grace.

Thus we apprehend
The universal trend
The larger purpose in what we intend.

Just as the moon directs the tide
There is a light that is our guide
And what the stars cannot provide
Is left for mortals to decide.

Here is the proof that I propose:
Before the moon from earth arose
It held a secret to disclose
Stranger than we can suppose.

Truth Fades Like Beauty

No timeless treasure wrought bright and cold
Truth fades like beauty, more leaf than gold.

Wu Wei

Darash

דָּרַשׁ

"Jewish exegesis would be called midrash, which derives from the verb darash, "to search," "investigate," "to go in pursuit of something" as yet undiscovered."

And They Laugh

"I have a friend who has a test for the best science questions. You're sitting around at the observatory, ready to start your observing, and you tell the other scientists what you're doing, and they laugh, and that's how you know you have a great program, because it's not something that everybody else is doing."

Anne Kinney, director of the Astronomy and Physics Division in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C, in the television series, The Planets, episode "Our Destiny."

The Advantages of Ambiguity

Ambiguity is underrated. It is often more valuable than precision. Nature is an economizer, adapting existing structures in novel ways. Very precise adaptations with no other uses are a sure-fire path to extinction in a world of perpetual change. Language that is too precise, that never changes spelling, meaning, or pronunciation, has all the excitement of a life insurance contract or a will.

To Go One's Own Way

αίρεσης

"In a pattern that would be repeated in later secular states, inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their "heresy," a word deriving from the Greek airesis, "to go one's own way."

Look to the End

"Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him."

Everything is Water

"Everything is water and the world is full of gods."