I didn’t take any math courses in college. It wasn’t required because I managed somehow to pass the basics in high school. I was relieved; I wasn’t good at math. But I didn’t hate it. A lot of people do, and I understand.
Here Edward Frenkel exhorts us to be curious about math, not to hate it, because human life is abstract and becoming more so. And math, he says, is the key to abstraction.
Funny. I would have said the key to abstraction is poetry. But that’s why I write and don’t do math. Still, he’s right about curiosity: tolerance for all manner of thought is essential to freedom and happiness.
I don’t see any difference between fiction and non fiction because it seems to me that the real is very much an imagined thing, and the imagination can become just as real as anything else.
Do you know who Arizona’s Poet Laureate is? No, me neither. They just inaugurated their first one this month. Based on reading this interview, it seems they have chosen wisely.
Bad writing precedes good writing. This is an infallible rule, so don’t waste time trying to avoid bad writing. (That just slows down the process.) Anything committed to paper can be changed. The idea is to start, and then go from there.
How large is consciousness? If, as Charles Simic says, there may be a moon shining within a stone, and just enough light to make out the star charts on its inner walls, then the limits of consciousness – if there are any – surely have no relation to the size of the human skull. Or the body’s place on planet Earth.
In order to imagine a walnut must consciousness be that small? It it can conceive the universe, isn’t it at least that big? Regardless, the mind is an easy place to get lost.
I have often said that we don’t need to come to terms with all the animals and plants of our planet, much less dominate, so much as to simply let it be. There is a great dignity in simply declining to be a destructive force, and pausing now and then in our hurried travels to make that possible.
Metaphor 