Rivka Galchen: These grand weather-control ideas, charted in mathematical detail, are works of the scientific imagination. I myself think of them as poems. They are constrained not by meter or rhyme or genre but by the stuff of our real world. We're used to thinking of constraints as a way to enhance the artistic imagination; we're just not used to these particular constraints, the laws of our universe as we understand them.
When we treat certain scientific imaginings as pragmatic undertakings rather than as a kind of art, we end up with bumbling disasters, occasionally profound evil, and now and again something like a smallpox vaccine and affordable clean-water resources for millions of people. But as a way of dreaming rigorously, these poems of science might be like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, or Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky.' Or like the work of the Marquis de Sade.
Leslie Fiedler, on Simone Weil: This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the 'imaginary,' our own dreams and self-deceits, the utopias of politicians, of the futile promises of future reward and consolation which the misled blasphemously call 'religion.'
