The Guidance of Theories

To go on investigating without the guidance of theories, is like attempting to walk in a thick mist without a track and without a compass. We should get somewhere under these circumstances, but chance alone would determine whether we should reach a stony desert of unintelligible facts or a system of roads leading in some useful direction; and in most cases chance would decide against us.

August Weismann, "Significance of Sexual Production..." Essays upon Heredity, vol I, 1886, p305.

Duck Park

a Pair of ducks turned up one day and parked themselves at the bottom of the tree just outside my office. They clearly wanted a bit of peace and quiet.

It was not a particularly good spot for them -- too much foot traffic. The next day ducks tried again before moving up into the flower beds. But after another day, they moved on.

Mother

I had to go and visit Mother in the nursing home.

The home was decorated with the intention of making everything seem normal. Her room was much like any hospital room, with plastic ferns and fireproof drapes. The chairs, resembling wrought-iron garden furniture, were also synthetic and light. I had trouble with the ferns. I disliked having to touch them to see if they were real. It was a reflection on my relation to reality that I couldn’t tell at a glance. But then Mother didn’t know me, either, which was a more complex matter than the ferns.

Quotation from: Saul Bellow Him With His Foot in His Mouth Penguin 2011 [originally published 1984]

Passion is...

Unless love is passion it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.

Passion doesn’t count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Anthony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. And if it doesn’t destroy it dies.

…self-confidence is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling.

Quotation: The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Leaf Fall with Submission to Winter

On sunny days I can hear leaves fall on the cars, and onto the pavements, from inside my office.

They are big leaves from a row of chestnut trees which flank the car-park and the banks of the Leith. They are not horse chestnuts, but some variety of American chestnuts, which they call buckeyes.

All it needed was a couple of days rain

To leave the trees almost leafless. Winter has come.

Ink People

The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real presence in our world. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.

Quotation: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. By Jonathan Gottschall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Use Your Meat Computer

I counted the food I had left. Four weeks’ worth, three weeks, two. I marked off the time with my eyebrow pencil. If I ate less, I could make it last longer. But if Amanda didn’t come soon, I’d be dead. I couldn’t really imagine it.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know — the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

I said, in that case is God knitted in as well? And he said maybe so, but it hadn’t done us any good.

His explanation of God was a lot different from the Gardeners’ explanation. He said “God is a Spirit” was meaningless because you couldn’t measure a Spirit. Also he’d say Use your meat computer when he meant Use your mind. I found that idea repulsive: I hated the idea of my head being full of meat.

Quotation from: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, 2009. Virago.