25 posts tagged with "books"

Finished Dune Messiah (2nd time, read 6-7 years ago too?). We all recognize that Tattoine is more than a little Dune-like, and the Sarlac pit is a great nod to Shai-hulud. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that Annakin had some level of prescience. His prescience warned him of his wife's death. But he accepted the bargain, became a tool. Thence the jihad and establishment of empire. Slightly twisted — Annakin is right hand, rather than Imperator, and jihad occurs post-death rather than ante-. And then I remembered the twins.

They are the aliment of imagination,
The wellspring of delight.
They turn stars into heroes,
Bring peace to the night.

Fear they can banish,
And in good measure bestow.
All good stories teach;
Even heroes they bring low.

Words are more than letters,
As letters are more than lines.
In the mirror of darkest tales,
Verily even sorrow shines.

When polished in contemplation,
The reflection you will find,
Far eclipses all that
The narrator had in mind.

Inspired by Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Strange on the surface, but makes deep sense to me: currently reading Darwin's Origin of the Species, and also started reading Stories of Baha'u'llah and Some Notable Early Believers (Baha'u'llah is the prophet-founder of the Baha'i Faith). Social-scientific evolution gives us a Charles Darwin and social-religious evolution/God gives us the Manifestation of the Cause of God for today. One brought us a better understanding of the physical world, and the other a better understanding of the spiritual world — and its implications for how we live out our lives as sentient beings in that physical world. Its implications for how we live amongst each other, for how we treat that Nature, which Darwin so carefully analyzed and loved. For how we reconcile ourselves to the seeming pointlessness of the universe (dead link removed; SF 2025).

In The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, Fritjof Capra attempts to present a synthesis of systems models as a new (and improved) way of looking at life. While scientists will often speak of paradigm shifts within a field — for instance from Newtonian to relativistic physics, or Lamarckian evolution to the Darwinian kind — it is rare that they attempt to link these individual shifts to a wider movement. It is probably rarer still that they attempt to create the overarching paradigm, as opposed to simply documenting it.

"The Chief idea of the novel is to portray the positively good man." This object Dostoyevsky has achieved in his 1869 novel The Idiot. It is the story of an invalid, sheltered in childhood, entering high society for the first time. His innocence leads him through fantasy, love, hatred, wealth, jealousy, and all the other attributes of earthly life--especially that life of the elite.