From "The Myth of Sisyphus":And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes - how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.
I'm stunned by the beauty of the language in this translation by Justin O'Brien, but I'm not sure if I agree with his point. Do you?
4 comments:
I feeeeeel like a lot of what is said towards the end is leaning towards the feelings I've been battling with? If I'm understanding it anyway.
And hey, "Bible Code"...whatchu know about it?
(Kelly)
I highly recommend "The Myth of Sisyphus" to everyone, but to you in particular. His premise is essentially "Life is chaos, why should we bother?". He dissects human existence and then puts it back together in such a way that by the end you KNOW that it's all worth it.
Bible codes. The idea that by changing the text of the old testament into numbers, symbols, etc, and looking for mathematical patterns, one can find secret messages from...who? god?
It's crap for several reasons. Firstly, the cryptographical techniques used to "decode" the bible DID NOT EXIST when these books were written.
It's like turning an ancient cave painting into numbers through some arbitrary system, then turning those numbers into a television signal, then staring at the static produced and looking for images.
You might see a static-y giraffe, but why would you think this was a part of the caveman's intent?
It's also crap because these texts have changed since they were first written down, and because they're not using the same techniques on other texts. If I turned "Green Eggs and Ham" into numbers and scrambled it up (teehee), would I get a prophecy for the end of the world? It depends how many times I run the numbers. No one's doing this to anything but the bible, so we don't really know. I would bet that by using these techniques, I could rescramble any text to say anything I want. Especially if I knew beforehand what I wanted the message to be.
When you lock a smart person inside the tiny room of theology, they'll naturally look for ways to make the room bigger. That's where this came from.
GOOD TO KNOW BEN =)
Now, next journal entry should be about how if e=mc^2, can we infact use light to make time travel?
I spent my weekend doing physics and it's YOUR FAULT.
Nah, it was fun. Keep the questions coming. One of these days I'll post an open call for science questions.
I've already figured out what to call it: "WTF, Science??".
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