 15 Mar 2004 @ 01:50
Paul A. Cantor is a Shakespearean scholar and the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. Significantly for me, he also wrote an essay on the contemporary painter Odd Nerdrum, whose Revier (c. 1990 - 1994) I coincidentally chose to grace this entry. [link] The writing that follows may be heavier going than that one in some ways, but I found the ideas most compelling and decided to share it.
The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.
---John Burroughs
He taught me all that I don't know.
---R.H. Blyth on D.T. Suzuki
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The Scientist and the Poet
Paul A. Cantor
"The worthiest professor of physics would be one who could show the inadequacy of his text and diagrams in comparison to nature and the higher demands of the mind."
--–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This is the kind of comment we expect from a poet on a scientist. Poets generally seem to be unsympathetic to science; they question its capacity to tell us the full truth about our world. Typically, poets claim that science offers us only abstractions, and destroys the living phenomena it purports to study in the very process of analyzing them into their separate (and hence lifeless) parts. As William Wordsworth famously put it: “We murder to dissect.” More >
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