It’s been ten years since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I now realize that my seventeen-year-old self was incapable of internalizing even a fraction of the tragedy and grace contained in this overwhelming story. A decade on, what was once fodder for my sophomoric literary intellect has recast itself as a narrative […]
“The brain constantly searches for meaning, for connections between objects and qualities that cross-cut the senses and provide information about external existence. We penetrate that world through the constraining portals of the epigenetic rules. As shown in the elementary cases of paralanguage and color vocabulary, culture has risen from the genes and forever bears their […]
“The key functions of the three successive divisions––the hind-plus midbrain, limbic system, and cerebral cortex––can be neatly summarized in this sequence: heartbeat, heartstrings, heartless.” ––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 117 “And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the […]
“Dreaming is a kind of insanity, a rush of visions, largely unconnected to reality, emotion-charged and symbol drenched, arbitrary in content, and potentially infinite in variety. Dreaming is very likely a side effect of the reorganization and editing of information in the memory banks of the brain. It is not, as Freud envisioned, the result […]
“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” ––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 59 “‘Never seen such tough mountains. This here’s a murder country. This here’s the bones of a country. Wonder if we’ll ever get in a place where folks […]
“‘They’s stuff goin’ on and they’s folks doin’ things. Them people layin’ one foot down in front of the other, like you says, they ain’t thinkin’ where they’re goin’, like you says––but they’re all layin’ ’em down the same direction, jus’ the same. An’ if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ […]
“Through light shed on the mental processes, Bacon wished to reform reasoning across all the branches of learning. Beware, he said, of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall. They are the real distorting prisms of human nature. Among them, idols of the tribe assume more order than […]
“Two hundred and fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars––wounded, steaming. Wrecks along the road, abandoned. Well, what happened to them? What happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from? And here’s a story […]
“Not one single history book is objective,” Jason Ripper writes in the final chapter of American Stories, Vol. II. “Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias” (260). I heartily agree. This admission of bias is in especially good taste given Ripper’s […]
“Not one single history book is objective. Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias.” ––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 260 “‘He says it don’t do no good to read books. Says he’s […]