Here's W.H. Auden in The Dyer's Hand generalizing about our senses:
"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition."
Is Auden right? I think he nailed our acoustic cortex. (For more on that, check out my Stravinsky chapter in the book.) But I'm not sure our sense of sight is quite as restless as he would have us believe.
Thanks for the tip Steve!
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Labyrinth
by W.H. Auden
Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.
The hundredth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.
"Where am I…
The other day I sallied forth to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up my copy of Richard Dawkins's new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. As I walked into the store I noticed a person stacking books on the main kiosk. She asked me if I was looking for something in…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll…
The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 57
Table of Contents
Chapter 59
Chapter 58
Ecology 110 - Water Vapour, January 6, 2058
Occasionally I am caught flat-footed by questions from students. It is one of the hidden benefits of teaching --- being kept on your toes. Theories of education…
For more on this, check out the doctoral thesis of Alice B. Sheldon (better known as the sci-fi writer James Tiptree) in the early 60s. Basically, she argued that novelty is appealing to the eye in familiar surroundings, but in a strange environment, the familiar is what attracts.