raccolta di citazioni

a commonplace for quotes from my current reading

2006-03-31

Mental cartography

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography -- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."
--Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, p. 261.

Quoted in Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, p. 250. ISBN 0743246748.

2006-03-29

Memory

"When I was young, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not." --Mark Twain (p. 100)

The gold of memory may be panned from experience, but it's washed in the acids of emotion, which etch the deepest memories.

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, p. 105. ISBN 0743246748.

The self

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." --Jorge Luis Borges (p.105)

A self is plural. To think of myself as singular, a choir of neurons living in different hills and hollows of the brain must sing in concert. Word travels fast in the back hills of the mind, through the hippocampus, that campus where memories are schooled, and the hobgoblin amygdala, spoiling for trouble, until a chorus of neurons becomes a thought.

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, p 124. ISBN 0743246748.

2006-03-26

The texture of life

Some years ago, I taught a class of writing students whose work was surprisingly jaded and featureless. Where was the texture of life, I wondered, the feel of being alive on this particular planet? Didn't it strike them as astonishing that they shared the planet with goldfinches and heliarc welders and dung beetles and blood brothers and shiitake mushrooms? Where was their fascination with the world pressing indelibly on what they wrote? Most of the students weren't even twenty-five; how could life already have bored them?
[...]
I wondered if I could reacquaint them with a cunning we inherited from our ancestors: we can seize a phenomenon with mental pincers and stop the world in its spin, if only briefly. Look patiently, affectionately, at anything, gather six or eight perceptions, and it will never look the same again. Because Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote "A thousand glass tambourines / were wounding the dawn," we know that he once sat and watched a crystal sunrise jingling with color as splinters of light reddened the horizon.

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, pp. 48-49. ISBN 0743246748.

2006-03-25

To live

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

--Emily Dickinson, quoted in Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind, p. 7.

The Enchanted Loom

Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes in a gym bag. The neocortex has ridges, valleys, and folds because the brain kept remodeling itself though space was tight. We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding yet undeniable fact that each person carries around atop the body a complete universe in which trillions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream. They mix privately, silently, while agitating on many levels, some of which we're not aware of, thank heavens. If we needed to remember how to work the bellows of the lungs or the writhing python of digestion, we'd be swamped by formed and forming memories, and there'd be no time left for buying cute socks.

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, p. 3. ISBN 0743246748.

Genetic drift

This study could be viewed as a kind of genealogy of the future, tracing the material, discursive, and social practices that contributed to the emergence and instantiations of the informational / scriptural visions of life, representations of heredity which animate the genomic future. But it is also a study of an epistemic rupture from purely material and energetic to an informational view of nature and society. We have seen that genes did not always transfer information, that these informational modes of reasoning were historically contingent. Up until around 1950, biologists described genetic mechanisms without ever using the term information (some, in fact, resisted its usage well into the 1960s and beyond); what had been transferred across biological space and time earlier was biological and chemical specificity. An overarching theme in the life sciences, specificity originated in an earlier historical epoch, a different biological world picture, and within the discourse of organization. Though often interchangeable, the two concepts -- specificity and information -- did not map directly onto each other; being historically situated, discourses seldom do. The discrepancies resided in the categorical difference between the two: specificity denoting material and structural properties; information denoting nonmaterial attributes, such as soul, potentialities, and form (telos), previously captured by the notion of organization and plan (logos). The genetic code had been widely viewed as the key to life's secret logos.

--Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 328. ISBN 0804734178.

2006-03-21

Origins

It is perhaps not too great an adjustment to imagine pirates sailing from comfortable homes like this after laying in a supply of winter firewood for the wife and family, and chopping it, then some fish and salt pork, molasses and tea, before raising a crew and setting out to plunder the Spanish Main. We're like a reverse of Australia: Puritans to pirates in two generations. Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.

--Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World. Fawcett, 1993, p. 10. ISBN 0449909662.