Everybody has expressed pleasure in Maria Popova's TUinV, and I suspect that we each find things therein that resonate with our worlds and understandings. But I'll bet they're not the same things, and it might be interesting to explore that variety. So here's the Question:
Do you have favorite bits that you'll keep by you as exemplary, revelatory, le mot juste, right on...
Any overall comments on the book? etc.
Sometimes books come along at just the right moment, and sometimes they need to be bestowed, shared among the like-minded. I first saw the notification that TUinV in May, with a publication date of October 1. So I preordered it from Amazon and it arrived on October1. Read it. Didn't take long for me to hatch the plan to distribute the book among Convivium households and...see what happens.
Are new Questions prompted by the text? What do we especially admire/appreciate in the book itself?
Particular bits of prose or poetry? the layout/design? the art work? the messages within?
and...
I'm going to keep track of my discoveries as I read and listen, in the usual way.
Science describes accurately from outside; Poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. (Ursula Le Guin)
...poetry has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. (pg 2)
...we, the people, on this minuscule and kithless globe... (Maya Angelou pg 73)
...before we came to believe humans were so important... (Maria Howe pg 9)
...once there were flowers, there was fruit —that transcendant alchemy of sunlight into sugar... (pg 11)
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ancillary links:
Howard Nemerov Wikipedia (he was Diane Arbus's older brother)
I got ...distracted [as is my wont]... into some time spent in the mysteries of the Fibonacci series.
Saturday is a day of abscissal wind, but I wouldn't have recognized it as such except for Popova pg 44. In Port Clyde the leaves were whirled into spirals... Fibonacci-like? thought I...
The above is a good example of the explosive effect The Universe in Verse ignites in my mind with each pass. I imagined that I had a pretty good general knowledge of 'science' (quondam Science Librarian, after all), but am quite humbled by how limited my compass really is... how marvelously Popova offers bridges to understanding, and to what the Questions are.
...which led into efforts to figure out the path from my notions of symmetry to the exquisite principle laid out by Emmy Noether, around which I haven't succeeded in wrapping my mind.
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The 'Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Hunger to Know the Universe' section is really a marvel of story unfolding, to crescendo as "...We saw to the edge of all there is—"
(It had never occurred to me that the paradigm before Hubble saw only a single galaxy)
...Andromeda was not a nebula in our own galaxy but a separate galaxy, out there in the cold, dark nothingness. Suddenly, the universe was a garden blooming with galaxies, with ours but a single bloom. (pg 24)
...what neither Henrietta Leavitt nor Edwin Hubble could have imagined— there isn't just one other galaxy besides our own, or just a handful more, but at least 100 billion, each containing at least 100 billion stars. (pg 25)
On Wednesday morning I snagged the Kindle version of TUinV as an experiment, using the Notebook to collect fragments that (in multiple readings and hearings) have struck me as distillations of the Essential, and as bits that affected how I think, thought, understood the world and Existence. Here's my Notebook collection of passages from the book, as of today. On subsequent readings and hearings, I'd probably add more.
