Society Inebriated by Technology

   For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness – and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
   
   The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Leon Wieseltier, ‘ “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture” A Defense of the Humanities’, The Commencement Ceremony of Brandeis University, 19 May 2013

Chinese Rice Grasshopper

Chinese Rice Grasshopper (Oxya chinensis, 中华稻蝗).

It is difficult to resist a short-horned grasshopper, unless they are gathered in one's crops or gardens. This one was perched on a rock as the mists began to rapidly envelop Hengshan.

Horace's Sabine Farm

Of course we have only the outline of a house. The walls and the roof have gone long ago, except for the lower courses which indicate the size and the style of the place; the fragmentary works of art and small utensils found during the dig are in a museum near by. Yet the floor-plan is clear, and some of the mosaic floors are still in place. As Horace himself says, it is a modest enough house. But anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting it will never again call it a farm. It was a charming country house, inhabited by a man who had good taste and loved comfort and seclusion.

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2010; 1957), pp. 144-45.

Mantid Ootheca

One last mantid find from our Hengshan trip: an ootheca, which had already hatched. What species it belongs to, I am somewhat uncertain. Perhaps H. chinensis or T. formosana?

The Latin for Cold

The Latin for Cold.

A school-master asked one of his scholars in the
winter time, what was the Latin for cold. " Oh!
sir," answered the lad, " I forget at this moment,
although I have it at my fingers' ends."

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps & A.J. Storey, Cambridge Jokes: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 1842), p .8.

Chinese Mantis

Chinese Mantis (Tenodera sinensis, 中华大刀螳).

One pleasure of visiting Hengshan mountain is the diversity and abundance of mantids. This large mantis was happily minding her own business and enjoying the windy weather.

A Poem to Help One Remember the Muses

Guarino Veronese (1374-1460)
Carmina de Musis

Esse Iovis natas cecinere poemata Musas,
Nanque hominum rebus dextras deus obtulit artes.
Instruit historiis mortales vivere Clio.
Tempora plantandi docuit legesque Thalia.
Euterpe monstrat quas fundat tibia voces.
Melpomene exponit varios distinguere cantus.
Terpsichore oblectat dehinc lumina nostra choreis.
Conubiis Erato gratos moderatur amores.
Ostendit sulcos segetesque Polymnia vitae.
Urania polos docet et portenta polorum.
Calliope vates ornat vocesque serenat.

The poems they sang were Muses, Jupiter’s daughters,
For the god offered skillful arts for the affairs of men.
Clio teaches mortals to live on in histories.
Thalia taught the seasons and rules for planting.
Euterpe teaches the flute which notes to utter.
Melpomene explains how to distinguish different songs.
Thereupon, Terpsichore adds cheer to our lives with dances.
Erato navigates pleasing loves into marriages.
Polymnia reveals the furrows and fields of life.
Urania shows the heavens and celestial omens.
Calliope honours poets and brightens their voices.

Guarino Veronese, Guarini Veronensis carmina, ed. by Aldo Manetti (Bergamo: Istituto universitario di Bergamo, 1985), pp. 61-62. My translation.

Gordius Worm

Gordius ssp. (铁线虫属).

During our annual Autumn trip to Hengshan we found a disoriented mantis (hierodula chinensis), stumbling around our hotel at night. We placed it in a container with a little water and three of these gordius worms rapidly came out. Most likely the unlucky mantis has been carrying these horsehair worms in her abdomen for months and were drawing her towards water: to drown and allow the worms to escape, lay eggs and continue their cycle of life.

The Beginning of the End of Civilisation

Ray Bradbury (as reported by Kingsley Amis):

In writing the short novel “Fahrenheit 451,” I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (London: New English Library, 1969; 1960), p. 96.

Marvel of Peru

Marvel of Peru (Mirabilis jalapa, 紫茉莉).

As the name suggests, it is a South American flower, but here it was blooming along a mountain road on Hengshan.

Bald Heads

Knowledge is the web to be filled and colored with feeling and desire. Looking back to the curiosities and perceptions of boyhood’s years, I recall my capture by phrenology. A shop was given to it on Broadway, where I bought a plaster head showing all the bumps. Church hours were beguiled by the study of bald heads around me.

Henry Osborn Taylor, A Historian’s Creed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 80-81.

Hemiboea Subcapitata

Hemiboea subcapitata (降龙草).

This plant can be found throughout southern China, though this is the first time I have encountered it in the wild, flowering in Taohualing Park. Perhaps I would have observed it more often if I paid more attention to plants when they are not in flower.

Indian Zehneria

Indian Zehneria (Zehneria japonica, 马㼎儿).

This is the first time I have seen this gourd on Yuelu Mountain, though I have come across them in nearby areas. There was only one: hanging on a single vine with withered leaves.

Autumn's Tree

O autumn winds that bake and burn
And all the world to darkness turn,
Now storm and seize and make of me...
A swarm of leaves from Autumn's Tree!

Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 67.