Words&Dirt

“They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance––they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones.  It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

Daniel gathered the dog’s remains up in his arms––messy, but it scarcely mattered––all their clothes would have to be burned anyway––and walked out to the bone-yard on the east side of the cottage, where the remains of all Hooke’s and Wilkins’s investigations were burned, buried, or used to study the spontaneous generation of flies.  Notwithstanding which, the air was relatively clean and fresh out here.  Having set the remains down, Daniel found that he was walking directly towards a blazing planet, a few degrees above the western horizon, which could only be Venus.  He walked and walked, letting the dew on the grass cleanse the blood from his shoes.  The dawn was making the fields shimmer pink and green.

Isaac had sent him a letter: ‘Require asst. w/obs. of Venus pls. come if you can.’  He had wondered at the time if this might be something veiled.  But standing there in the dew-silvered field with his back to the house of carnage and nothing before him but the Dawn Star, Daniel remembered what Isaac had said years ago about the natural harmony between the heavenly orbs and the orbs we view them with.  Four hours later he was riding north on a borrowed horse.”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 146

“The refusal to submit one’s own assumptions and values to the same critical scrutiny that we so readily and enthusiastically direct toward others is one of the great sins that plagues the human race.  As a counter-weight to cognitive rigor mortis, it is our plasticity of mind, with its corresponding flexibility of thought, that occasionally permits us to rise above the sedimented habits of thought, feeling, and valuing into which we have too comfortably settled.  Without this flexibility, we would have no capacity for criticizing and remaking our situation, so we would lack any resources for forward motion when our entrenched habits run up against the changing conditions of experience.”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 68