'Such omniscience ... would extinguish its soul'

In science greater knowledge is always and indisputably good; it is by no means so throughout all human existence. We know it from art proper, where achievement and great factual knowledge, or taste, or intelligence, are in no way essential companions; if they were, our best artists would also be our most learned academics. We can know it by reducing the matter to the absurd, and imagining that God, or some Protean visitor from outer space, were at one fell swoop to grant us all knowledge. Such omniscience would be worse than the worst natural catastrophe, for our species as a whole; would extinguish its soul, lose it all pleasure and reason for living.

—John Fowles, The Tree (1979)

Why should there not be a handle?

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff--he tends to act a though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them--and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him.  Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras.  This man would like to know :  Why should there not be a handle?  Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.            

 It's true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet does not merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy.  There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality... 

There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility. I believe the appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook, is due to the fact it nonetheless captures something true. It points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.

--Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009)

Metricate, American Style

This story is true. Any resemblance of the persons to fictional characters, living or dead, is coincidental.

Time: Summer 1975
Place: Chicago
Scene: Plush Lounge in Fantastic Hotel where educators at the First Annual America School Metrication Convention are meeting for a week.

Persons                    Symbol
Ms. Libby Elementri    LIB
Mr. M. Etric                MET

[...]

MET: Japan had a great effort to go metric originally in their schools, but did not have the backing of industry. It took them forty years to convert. At one time they even had three different systems going for them. England had a pretty good effort on the part of industry to metricate, but their educational program left something to be desired.

LIB: How do you see our situation

MET: I hardly even know you.

LIB: Come on, don't be funny.

MET: Well, our industries and large corporations like IBM, GM, and Ford are really leading the way, and there is this guy out in some place called Rhode Island—I think it's in New York—he's really pushing American metrication. Now it is up to our educational institutions to do what they are supposed to be expert in—educating. The whole problem is educational, no matter what sectors are involved.

LIB: What do you think our schools should do?

MET: Metricate, American style.

—John Izzi, Metrication, American Style (1974)

Miracle

The very word 'miracle' itself, and for that matter the words 'natural' and 'supernatural', are in fact symptomatic of a very different range of possible worldviews from those that were open to Galilean villagers in the first century. The evangelists use words like paradoxa, things one would not expect; dunameis, displays of power or authority; terata or semeia, signs or potents. The closest we come to 'miracle' is the single occurance of thaumasia, 'marvels', in Matthew 21:15. These words do not carry, as the English word 'miracle' has sometimes done, overtones of invasion from another world, or from outer space. They indicate, rather, that something has happened, within what we would call the 'natural' world, which is not what would have been anticipated, and which seems to provide evidence for the active presence of an authority, a power, at work, not invading the created order as an alien force, but rather enabling it to be more truly itself.

—N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996)

And they wake up the next morning as always

I walk up Beverveien towards the Metro station by the shopping centre. It is twelve o'clock. Over the rooftops I can hear the bells ringing after church. It's still cold, but the sky is all blue and the sun is thawing the mud on the road, and it leaves grey-brown stripes on my shoes, and outde the station there are shards of glass and bloodstains on the tarmac. They are pink and pale after the night. On the corner in front of Stallen, which used to be Glasmagasinet, people are looking at the display they have seen a hundred times before. They're pretending to be out for a Sunday stroll. But I know them and know they are circling the centre waiting for Geir's bar to open at one. They just can't stay at home any longer and keep their fists in their pockets to hid their shaking hands. I feel like yelling at them, for Christ's sake pull yourselves together, and stay out of my way! I know they won't pull themselves together, it's too late. They are old, their days are over, everything they have known is gone, all the things they could do, and now here they stand, scraping their feet against the ground, letting the clock tick them closer to their first gulp, and then they'll sit and drink until their bodies calm down and will talk rubbish about everything being so wonderful, and when evening comes, they have to go home, and so they fall asleep early and hope their dreams won't be too bad, and then they wake up the next morning as always. 

--Per Petterson, It's Fine by Me (1992)

'how easily and insensibly we ... make a beaten path for ourselves'

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten path for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

We are spontaneously idolatrous

All human beings have their hearts set somewhere, hold something sacred, worship at some shrine. We are spontaneously idolatrous—where, by ‘idolatry’, I mean the worship of some creature, the setting of the heart on some particular thing (usually oneself). For most of us there is no single creature that is the object of our faith. Our hearts are torn, dispersed, distracted. We are (to use the seventeenth-century term) polytheists. And none of us is so self-transparent as to know quite where, in fact, our hearts are set.

Against this background, the great religious traditions can be seen as contexts in which human beings may learn, however slowly, partially, imperfectly, some freedom from the destructive bondage which the worship of the creature brings.

 —Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of 'Religion' (1996)

What is Good in Itself

St. Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist—for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

—Flannery O'Connor, "Catholic Novelists and Their Readers" (1969)

Some Books

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

—Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" (1625)

The gantlet.

I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. . . . Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854)