While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the

While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos: “Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance … rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human … To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. Technology is the so arranging of the world that it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing. Machine-made consciousness, man content to serve as an obliging cog, is unable to connect the past to the present, the present to the past. The failure to do so breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.”This and more in today’s culture roundup. (Image Credit: Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke) -- source link

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