The World's Fair

Somehow I thought the quote below might go with the "Letter to the Dead" poem I posted yesterday. So I will offer in in the same vein of not-too-much-pre-commentary. It's just a quote. But it does a few things:

• Ties the very idea of knowledge to the idea of progress in yesterday's poem (how strange to speak about the "idea" of knowledge, isn't it?)


• Evokes an elegant image of Nature, eternity, and essence (though brings with it the danger of having me be perceived as associating with essentialism, which I won't weigh in on now)


• It has a kind of six-degrees feel, the way in which the quote even came to me


• As with so many things, goes through the Weschler node of convergences (as with this post, this one, and this one)


• And yes, the new semester started last week and I haven't had time to post anything legit in a while, which gets me here, again, with quotes and references and poems instead of answering Ask a Sb questions that, since global-warming related, make my head hurt for not knowing which how to frame my answer

That turns out to be far more pre-commentary than with the poem. So it goes. Here's the quote:

"The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in an abyss in ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their inner-most essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are a reflection of eternity."

--Sir Thomas Browne, by way of W.G. Sebald, by way of Lawrence Weschler (by way, to me, of WG, again)