Saturday, March 31, 2012

Facts Absorbed Without Context

"Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact."
Joe Queenan, New York Times, 3 October 2004

Nature

Nature is, what you may do.
Emerson (The Conduct of Life: Fate)

Friday, March 30, 2012

The People Without Stories

The fact that we tell stories is a symptom of our predicament. Gossip stories, adventure stories. We need them, yet they have a pernicious effect on us. Blessed would be the people without stories, if any such existed.

Dreaming

"Dreaming is a natural process, like eating or working, that we have the opportunity to make more beautiful if we wish to."
N.N. Scott, in conversation 2004

The Souls in Plato's Cave

"Like the souls in Plato's cave, we ourselves cast the shadows that make us aware of our existence, and at the same time block the light that is the source of our existence."
N.N. Scott, in conversation, 2004

Dangerous Stories

"Some stories are extremely dangerous, but not in the way most people believe: not because they refer to socially uncomfortable issues and facts. They are dangerous because they teach us to think in the wrong way about our problems."
N.N. Scott, in conversation, (2004)

Our Weak Points

"At this time, before things get really messy, we should work to clarify our understanding of our weak points, our doubt."
Dr. Peter Khan, in conversation, 2006

Your Pilgrimage

"You are now on your pilgrimage well begun, and from tomorrow on you are the guests of Baha'u'llah."
Ali Muhammad Varqa, in conversation, 2006.

A Genuine Human Being

"While the world was full of people, all too full, finding a genuine human being was not easy."
Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi (1935) p.293

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Books Should Not Be Too Big

"Books should not be too big. A big book resembles one of those panning-for-gold tourist attractions in the Rocky Mountains: a few flakes of gold amid much sand and water."
N.N. Scott, 2006

A Good Ending

"The story should end where the next story most logically begins. A good ending is a good beginning."
(from one of my notebooks, 2006)

Overheard in Texas

"The more you look at someone, the more they become a human being, and the more trouble you have slitting their throat and dumping them into a hole in the ground."

Utter Naivete

The sign of utter naivete is to wander into tendentious, polemical discussions without realizing it -- like cave divers who swim beyond their air.

Competing for the Same Space

The atheistic cosmology is only the extreme state of the religious belief that the creator of the universe is separate, a thing we supplicate at a distance. These two viewpoints prompt such contention because they are both on the same side of the equation, and competing for the same mental space.

Too Complex to Study

"Physics [...] restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties."
Noam Chomsky, New Scientist, 19 March 2012

Stories of Ourselves

Art loses its way when what is right and wrong cease to matter, when our views become no more than stories of ourselves.
N.N. Scott

Made for War

The creature made for war who nevertheless yearns for peace is an emblem of the body, which was created for war with the world.
N.N. Scott (see Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, introductory aphorism XXIV)

Fallacies of Neuroscience

"This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions."
Roger Scruton, Spectator.co.uk., 17 March 2012

Originality in the arts and sciences

"When a well-known scientist, John Wheeler, writes that 'matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move', we may or may not be impressed, but it is hard to reorient one's worldview accordingly, to abandon the sense that there is an absolute "now" in every corner of the universe and that empty space is just a void ready to be filled, and cannot be bent, and is a distinct entity from time. The Einsteinian revolution may have redefined the absolute basics of matter, energy, space and time, but the limits of our mental equipment keep us in our evolutionary homelands, in the savannah of commonsense."
Ian McEwan, guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2012

Saturday, March 17, 2012

What archivists provide

"Archivists provide the basis for your life by anchoring your rights and privileges in the public record."
-- Dr. David Gracy, University of Texas School of Information (in a lecture, 2005)