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“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca. The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony. Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from… read article
The prisons we choose to live inside hardly ever look like prisons while we are living in them. If the twentieth century was the age of dictatorships — I grew up in one — reducing human beings to a herd, the twenty-first century, with its self-appointed moral despots, is the age of the tyranny of the herd itself. Having invented a merciless weapon of individual destruction — the pitchfork of the cancel mob — we are now doing to human nature what we have already done to nature, turning a biodiverse wilderness into a monoculture of a single crop deemed… read article
“You have found an intermediate space… where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his transcendent portrait of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself. “All the world is mind,” the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. To watch the world come awake is to contact the essence of its worldness, to begin apprehending the majesty and mystery of what makes this third-rate rock an irreplaceable wonder.… read article
We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness. Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended, without purpose or end goal, governed… read article
More in literature
It's a showdown between Elysium and Tartarus.
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” by Thomas Gray appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Louisiana poet Gail White published three poems in Peacock Journal, all freighted with serious thought and all skirting the charms of light verse. White avoids the failings of pretentiousness and mere silliness. Consider “Resemblances”: “Somewhere along the primrose path That led to my seventies, I lost the blithe agility Of the young springbok’s knees, “The swift gait of the wildebeest Running with its herd, And the keen eye of the crouching cat Under the nesting bird, “Retaining only the stoic love Of the elephant for its kin And the fierce desire of the salmon For the stream it was nurtured in.” Chronicling the losses and infirmities of aging can turn readily into a wallow in self-pity, which is ridiculous if you consider the alternative. Unspoiled youth is incompatible with longevity, and adults accept those inevitabilities with dignity and “stoic love.” White’s twelve-line, one-sentence poem reminds us that mortality is universal, what we share with the rest of the Earth’s fauna. We’re in the same boat (Noah’s ark) as nematodes and capybaras. White adds a prose statement to her poems: “Aquinas, who had a gift for concise definition, once said that ‘We call that beautiful which pleases the eye.’ It’s hard to improve on the simplicity of that. Pleasing the eye, which includes reading, has always been my goal, and aesthetics my primary value. From this comes a love of art museums, travel, living next to running water, poetry, the Victorian novel, and cats. (Few things please the eye as much as a good cat). It might have been more noble if my highest value had been unconditional love, but if I’m honest, I admit I’m stuck with beauty.” Not a bad place to be stuck. Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth enduring. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953) – one of my favorite books -- Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime: “Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.” It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences: “Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.” Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (trans. T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”
Sewing cultures together The post Cici Osias appeared first on The American Scholar.
Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask. There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother: “Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.” The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures. Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I what to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750: "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."
