This is a book about one of the most important problems of our time—the problem of How to Make the Best of Both Worlds, the world of science on the one hand and, on the other, the world of total human experience, public and subjective, individual and cultural. This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature.”What is the function of literature,” Mr. Huxley asks, “what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?”Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of “the Two Cultures.” unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples.Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience. — Book description from the dust cover
Whoever wrote the dust cover should have written the book. The copious quotations that he speaks of were mostly in French with only a few of them having English translations. I understood the dust cover but very little of the book. I provide one quote from the book, if you understand it then you will probably like the book. I didn’t understand it.
It is so quiet,
The cicada’s voice Penetrates
The rocks.
In this haiku by Basho the experience recorded is of a unique event through which the Suchness of things, the divine Ground, as Meister Eckhart would call it, breaks out of eternity into time. To communicate this indescribable event, the Japanese poet has refined his utterance to the point where it seems about to turn into the creux neant musicien of a silence as absolute as that which filled the spaces between the rocks and by mysterious implication (and yet how indubitably!) imparted to the mindless repetition of insect noises a kind of absoluteness, a cosmic significance…At the opposite pole to the mode of expression by mysterious implication is the mode of direct expression by means of the mot juste. The tribe’s language can be purified into expressiveness by the choice of the right noun, the perfect adjective, the supremely apt verb.
I have had a problem with the FileBird Media Library, where all my images are kept in WordPress, for a couple of weeks. The Support for FileBird have been working on the problem for a few days and have accomplished nothing so far. I’m not sure what I’ll do if they don’t fix it. Have been looking for alternatives and the best I have found so far is just live with it, maybe another update will fix it or make the problem worse.
I was reasonably sure that the problem was related to my using an Android tablet. Tried to get a friend some distance away that I knew had a laptop to do some tests for me. Ever try to set down written instructions on how to do something on a computer? I think I made a hash of it because it took us far to many emails back and forth to step through half of the tests I wanted to do.
Then just be chance a neighbor in the the Park hear from one of my other neighbors about my needing a laptop. She volunteered the use of hers and with me doing backseat driving (telling her where to put the cursor and click) we did the entire test in less time than it has taken me to type this.
What the test proved to me is that my Android tablets are the problem but only in part. With FileBird deactivated I can access the WordPress Media Library, that contains all images that I have saved, and select an image from the tablet using the touch screen. It is in FileBird where there are folders that contain the images by category that I can’t select from the touch screen. So, it is a touch screen and FileBird issue. The coding for the folders in FileBird doesn’t recognize a touch screen tap but does recognize a cursor click.
I will be doing more research to see if I can find a solution other than writing code for FileBird to fix the problem. I suspect that this is a known issue at FileBird but the ‘Support’ people I have been emailing either don’t know the reason or have just been shinning me on.