A man....

. . . He is a middle-aged man who has ‘seen much, read much, and retained much’, a professional man of experience, a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, a man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells this story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis’. (viewed in relation to the eternal; in a universal perspective.) There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs, order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it. Moreover, had there this disturbance? The evocation of an abrupt change would frighten this bourgeois society. Neither the general nor the doctor confides his recollections in the raw state; there are experiences from which they have extracted the quintessence, and they warn us, from the moment they start talking, that their tale has a moral. Besides, the story is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example. . . 126

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Dinesh ^club

Foreword ~ E. O. Wilson

Homo sapiens can justly be called the mythopoeic ( relating to the making of myths; causing, producing, or giving rise to myths) species. Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity came to be part of it. The brain’s architecture automatically makes up stories, and the mind it creates is a theater of competing scenarios. The brain is not confined, animal-like, to instant sensory impressions followed by rough association of these impressions with past reward and punishment. Instead, it searches continuously backward across time to re-create past events, real and imaginary, and forward to invent future scenarios. Stories that are pleasing to reason and emotion outcompete other less so. Replacing them, they serve thereafter as maps of future action. During this process the self, the central protagonist of the scenarios, is perceived within the present-moment scenario as having reached a decision.

The primal instinct of the narrative, of continuous scenario invention, is what makes the human brain superior in performance. In dreams we construct stories of unconstrained fantasy. In gossip we evaluate others with tales of their exploits and foibles. And in religious myths we repeat the epics that ennoble our lives, our tribe, and our species. ~ ix

Excerpt from “Everybody’s Story - Wishing Up to the Epic of Evolution - Author: Loyal Rue. Introduction by E.O.Wilson

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

J.Garcia ^club

Absolutely fascinating image and texts

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

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