Order of the Universe #39

[…] we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations. I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized brain—and I am equally confident that our brains became large as an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting functions). But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection. Our brains are enormously complex computers. If I install a much simpler computer to keep accounts in a factory, it can also perform many other, more complex tasks unrelated to its appointed role. The additional capacities are ineluctable consequences of structural design, not direct adaptations. Our vastly more complex organic computers were also built for reasons, but possess an almost terrifying array of additional capacities—including, I suspect, most of what makes us human. Our ancestors did not read, write, or wonder why most stars do not change their relative positions while five wandering points of light and two larger disks move through a path now called the zodiac. We need not view Bach as a happy spinoff from the value of music in cementing tribal cohesion, or Shakespeare as a fortunate consequence of the role of myth and epic narrative in maintaining hunting bands.

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981)

Order of the Universe #38

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

E.M. Forster, Howard's End (1910)

Death #8, Order of the Universe #37

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Books on Books #7, Order of the Universe #36

Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.

The world is made to end in a beautiful book.

Stephen Mallarmé, Réponse à des enquêtes, sur l'évolution littéraire (1869)

Food #16, Order of the Universe #35

All culinary tasks should be performed with reverential love, don’t you think so? To say that a cook must possess the requisite outfit of a culinary skill and temperament—that is hardly more than saying that a soldier must appear in uniform. You can have a bad soldier in uniform. The true cook must have not only those externals, but a large dose of general worldly experience. He is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.

Norman Douglas, South Wind (1917)

Order of the Universe #34

The final truth about life is always an absurdity but it cannot be an absolute absurdity. It is an absurdity inasfar as it mush transcend the “system” of meaning which the human mind always prematurely constructs with itself as the centre. But it cannot be a complete absurdity or it could not achieve any credence.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 2 (1943)

Auden #21, Love #23, Order of the Universe #33

Culture, in fact, is something more than merely a relative anthropological concept. “Men are born not with equal abilities but with an equal weakness.” Culture, then, is something to be won, and difficult to retain. It is not knowledge, though knowledge is essential; it is not intellect or will, though these are the means to its attainment; it is not self-expression, though those who have it are more truly themselves: it might be defined as a power to resist a blind all-or-none reaction to the immediate stimulus, a willingness to make choices and to admit when, as will often happen, they prove wrong, an awareness, with Dante, that “man was never without love natural and love rational. The natural is always without error, but the other may err through an evil object ... love is the seed of every virtue in you and of every deed that deserves punishment.”

W.H. Auden, review of Historian and Scientist, by Gaetano Salvemini, The Nation (July 6, 1940)

Food #14, Order of Universe #32

[F]ood and wine—...the formalization of gastro-sensory pleasure—must be an essential aspect of the whole life, in which the sensuous-sensual-spiritual elements are so intimately interwoven that the incomplete exploitation of any one can only result in the imperfect opening of the great flower, symbol of the ultimate perfection which is understanding, when all things fall into place...

Richard Olney, Simple French Cooking (1974)

Order of the Universe #31, Christianity #9, History #16

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endless by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)

Aphorisms #8, Order of the Universe #30

What happens to Golden Ages is that they are supplanted by ages symbolized by baser, more practical metals.

Guy Davenport

Manhattan #41, Order of the Universe #29

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City” (1932)

Death #6, Order of the Universe #28

All the Flowers of the Spring
Meet to perfume our burying:
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time.
Survey our progresse from our birth,
We are set, we grow, we turne to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites;
Sweetest Breath, and clearest eye,
Like perfumes goe out and dye;
And consequently this is done,
As shadowes wait upon the Sunne.
Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

John Webster, from The Devil's Law-Case (c. 1623)

Time #17, History #14, Order of the Universe #27

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” Essays, First Series (1841)

Order of the Universe #26, Music #14

Peut-être est-ce le néant qui est le vrai et tout notre rêve est-il inexistant, mais alors nous sentons qu’il faudra que ces phrases musicales, ces notions qui existent par rapport à lui, ne soient rien non plus. Nous périrons mais nous avons pour otages ces captives divines qui suivront notre chance. Et la mort avec elles a quelque chose de moins amer, de moins inglorieux, peut-être de moins probable.

Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who follow and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.

Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann
English translation by Lydia Davis

Order of the Universe #25

This shining moment is an edifice
Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Order of the Universe #24

[W]hat are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

Order of the Universe #23

An epoch not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.

Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé of 1935"

Order of the Universe #22, Love #22

Language has not the power to speak what love indites:
The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

John Clare, fragment

Order of the Universe #21

The heavens are wrath—the thunders rattling peal
Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky
Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel
Nor chills with fear eternal destiny

My soul is apathy—a ruin vast
Time cannot clear the ruined mass away
My life is hell—the hopeless die is cast
& manhoods prime is premature decay

Roll on ye wrath of thunders—peal on peal
Till worlds are ruins & myself alone
Melt heart & soul cased in obdurate steel
Till I can feel that nature is my throne

I live in love sun of undying light
& fathom my own heart for ways of good
In its pure atmosphere day without night
Smiles on the plains the forest & the flood

Smile on ye elements of earth & sky
Or frown in thunders as ye frown on me
Bid earth & its delusions pass away
But leave the mind as its creator free


John Clare, excerpts from “Written in a Thunderstorm July 15 1841”

Order of the Universe #20, Apocalypse #16

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay that leads to death has already begun.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1938)