Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes.
Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos. We crave simple narratives.
[Ed Yong; “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing”; The Atlantic; 29/04/2020; https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/]
And the desire to name an antagonist … disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups.
[Ed Yong; “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing”; The Atlantic; 29/04/2020; https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/]
The relationship between sound and time is one woven deep in our culture. Andrew Marvell, in To His Coy Mistress, hears “time’s winged chariot”. Justice Shallow has heard “the chimes at midnight”. Anthony Powell writes of A Dance to the Music of Time. Nineteen Eighty-Four opens with the brilliantly unheimlich detail of the clocks “striking thirteen”. And TS Eliot, in The Waste Land describes London commuters flowing “up the hill and down King William Street,/To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine”. Time is, as scientists know, a very strange thing indeed.
[Sam Leith; TLS; 6 June 2020]
Technological advances in the detection of radiation, from X-rays to optical light to radio waves, and great improvements in computing power and storage [allowed scientists] to deal with the vast amount of data they produced. The technology was by and large developed for other purposes – it is what gave us people walking about looking at their smartphones instead of where they are going – and was adapted by inventive astronomers for cosmological tests.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 6 June 2020]
We haven’t been issued a guarantee that we can make sense of the physical world around us … But lest there be doubt about how well physics has been doing so far, consider how successfully scientists and engineers can command the behaviour of electrons, atoms and molecules, as well as electric and magnetic fields, in cellphones. All of this has been done based on incomplete approximations.
… … …
My point is that all of physics is incomplete. I certainly don’t mean wrong, I mean that it can all be improved. Maybe there is a final theory of physics, or maybe it is approximations all the way down.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 6 June 2020]
She drew the epigraph from Proust: “Les gens du monde se représentent volontiers les livres comme une espèce de cube dont une face est enlevée, si bien que l’auteur se dépêche de ‘faire entrer’ dedans les personnes qu’il rencontre”. (“Society people think that books are a sort of cube, one side of which the author opens the better to insert into it the people he meets”.)
[Angela Thirkell]
Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
ie. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
[Mary Karr; VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God]
Some believed eels were born of sea-foam, or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew that covered lakeshores and riverbanks in the spring. In the English countryside, where eel fishing was popular, most people adhered to the theory that eels were born when hairs from horses’ tails fell into the water.
[Patrik Svensson; The Book of Eels]
More next month. Be good!