воскресенье, 8 мая 2011 г.

Our Current Understanding of the Universe

...is like watching a cat walk past in front of a small hole. You see the head, and then the body and then the tail, but not the whole cat at once. So you believe the head causes the body to appear, and the body causes the tail to appear, but it's actually the whole cat with  no cause and effect at all beyond its simple 'catness'.
My father patiently argued that from this perspective the head does cause the body to appear and so on, and if you were watching a cat walk past in front of a small hole you would never see the body of the cat first, and then the head and then the tail, not because of a mysterious 'catness' but because cats, walking in the straight line, tend to go head first, and in that sense the movement of the cat, its physiognomy, the structure of its legs and so on do cause the head to appear first, and this does in some way cause the rest to 'happen'.
It was this discussion that had caused Caleb and my father to end up lying there watching through the cat-flap, both hoping for a real-life illustration of their particular argument. The cats, however, were all asleep in the laundry basket upstairs and so my father and Caleb just watched the empty kitchen for a while...(p.190)


...No doubt many people will think this provides a blueprint for living based on what we have learnt from the most well-loved fiction. But we don't need blueprints for living, and all we learn from the most well-loved fiction is that the moral high ground protects you from almost anything, and the way you get on in this world is to go out and kill anything monstrous, other or different because you don't like it, and that if you do this you end up with treasure and a princess - money and sex.... The Hero's Journey is actually a colonial journey. It's the journey of the American Dream. There are many different types of story-pattern all over the world that don't show a hero going to good fortune from bad fortune through overcoming. Of course, at the moment, the loudest voices do tell these hero-myths, and claim that this has been so since the beginning of time. In fact, the abundance of this story-type at this point in history is a cultural, not an essential fact. It's an interesting word, OVERCOMING... I read it as a  verb applied to  a man who ejaculates too much, also in every sense. He comes onto everything...(p.344)
                                 (Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston  New York, 2010)