The world is humming with organizing patterns that affect our minds in ways we've hardly begun to appreciate. Our psychology and neurobiology, of course, shape how we receive and interpret those patterns. But my feeling is that we do not create them any more than we create the songbird's call or the movement of wind in the trees. What seems like nature mysticism now could be the next generation's environmental science: both an intimation of the biosphere's complex information exchange and a glimpse into nature's vast interiority, intelligence -- maybe even agency.
Fray Luis de León, the great humanist scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, one of the sages of Salamanca University, was condemned by the Inquisition for translating the Song of Solomon and spent four years in prison before being allowed to return to his lectern, where he began his first lecture with the phrase, "Decíamos ayer": "As we were saying yesterday..."
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Quote for the day
Jeff Warren: