Excerpts from Book that I read

For practical purposes, humans aren’t considered animals. When Darwin proposed in 1859 that we had evolved from apes, it’s no wonder the most people initially regarded his theory as absurd and continued to insist that we had been separately created by God. Many people including a quarter of all Americans college graduates, still hold to that belief today. But on the other hand, we obviously are animals, with the usual animal body parts, molecules, and genes. It’s even clear what particular type of animals we are. Externally, we’re so similar to chimpanzees that eighteenth century anatomists who believed in divine creation could already recognize our affinities. Just imagine taking some normal people, stripping all their cloths, taking away all their other possessions, depriving them of the power of speech, and reducing them to grunting, without changing their anatomy at all. Put them in a cage in the zoo next to the chip cages, and let the rest of could be seen for what we all really are: chimps that have little hair and walk upright. A zoologist from Outer Space would immediately classify us as just a third species of chimpanzee, along the pigmy chimp of Zaire and the common chimp of the rest of tropical Africa.

assets.cambridge.org/97805218/71389/frontmatter/9780521871389_frontmatter.pdf

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deeie1lkOaU

Aboutness is one of several concepts that may be grouped together, by a sort of family resemblanc, under the larger concept of teleology. Aboutness, functionality, representation, intentionality, value and meaningfulness are all teleological terms, That is they involve some telos (plural: tele), some end, goal, or purpose. ~ Page 10 "Nature is Enough" Author Loyal Rue

....... He (Bernard Shaw) wrote a book entitled 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism' in which he set out a lot of his own interpretations of Ibsen: that he had sought to rescue his generation from materialism; that the aim of life is self-improvement, self-fulfillment; that morality is not fixed but evolves; that standards can never be eternal; that modern European literature is more important in teaching us how to live than the Bible, and that "Mozartian joy" is the aim of life. ~ Page 100

At pains to show that poetry is at the forefront (another reason for hope, another form of hope), he (Milosz) asserts that what is new is that our future will not be determined by jets as the means of transport, or by a decrease in infant mortality, important as those things may be. "It is determined by humanity's emergence as a new elemental force; until now humanity had been divided into castes distinguished by dress, mentality, and mores." This transformation is causing the disappearance of certain mythic notions, "widespread in the last century, about the specific and presumably eternal features of the peasant, worker, and intellectual. Humanity as an elemental force, the result of technology and mass education, means that man is opening up to science and art on an unprecedented scale." Is the disappearance of religion in our lives any different from disappearance of some of the nineteenth century myths, embodied in imperialism, racial superiority and colonialism? He asks. No one mourns their passing no one foresees their return. ~ Page 452 As preparation and explanation of what poetry is, and seeks to be, and how it brings meaning to our lives and what type of meaning, Heaney en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney can hardly be bettered "[A poem] begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down it turns a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of life -- not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion....in its repose the poem gives us a premonition of harmonies desired and not inexpensively achieved. In this way, the order of art becomes an achievement intimating a possible order beyond itself, although its relation to that further order remain promissory rather than obligatory. Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it." There are two points here that relate directly to our theme. One, that poetry offers clarification that is "not necessarily great," and two, that art intimates a possible order beyond itself. ~ Page 457

In his book "The Age of Atheists"

In marriage, the women's graceful ivy was seen as ornamenting the man's sturdy Oak. Alas, Wollstonecraft says, if only husbands were so stable and reliable, rather than more like "overgrown children". Yet thanks to upbringing and lack of education, their wives are similarly weak. They lack order in their activities, because they were never taught method or reasoning. They learn only "in snatches," by observations picked up through daily life and society, and have no body of abstract knowledge against which to test what they discover. Women's mental understanding has always been sacrificed to the need to look good or seem charming, and even their body is only half-developed through lack of exercise or physical training. (Mary Wollstonecraft)

Excerpt from the book "Paper" by Mark Kurlansky

In 1565, as the story goes, a large oak tree was uprooted in a storm in Cumberland and an odd black mineral was discovered clinging to its roots. This led to the digging of England's first graphite mine and the development of the pencil -- a cheap, portable, erasable writing tool. Pencils in Europe are older than paper. The word comes from the Latin name of the type of fine-tipped writing brush, a 'penicillium'. The Greeks and Romans also sometimes used metallic lead to write or draw on papyrus, which is the origin of the modern expression "lead pencil" -- despite the fact that the modern pencil contains no lead. But technology is only embraced when it answers a society's needs, and only after a society began to write constantly and casually did the pencil become a commonplace tool. According to Henry Petrosky's history of the pencil, the first person known to use a graphite pencil was a sixteenth century Zurich writer named Konard Gesner. He mentions and even supplied an illustration of a graphite pencil in his 1565 book on fossils. It was at about this same time that graphite was discovered in Cumberland. Soon afterwards, graphite was inserted into a wooden tube and use of the new writing implement spread. By 1600, wooden cases and sticks of graphite were being sold, separately, on the streets of London. Pencils were initially most popular with scientists, but artists and writers used them too. In 1610 one artist recommended that books be marked with a pencil and later the markings erased. ........ Others noted that the pencil was a good tool when on horseback. By the eighteenth century, artists such as J.M.W Turner always began a painting by first making a pencil sketch. ~ Page 193