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Book excerpts

I recently spent some time deleting lots of old photos off my phone to free up space on its microSD card. This turned out to be futile on multiple points. For one thing, a solid 75% of all photos I have taken with it are of my cat, and obviously I don't delete *those*. For another, the thing's slow but steady slide into complete unusability due to interminable delays in every single action which each glances coyly at said microSD card apparently has nothing to do with it being near full and everything to do with a semi-recent update to Android doing something stupid with FUSE which users can't undo, so close to a big waste of time all 'round. I stipulate "close to" because while clearing things out I had the pleasure of re-reading a bunch of book passages which I had bothered to photograph while reading those books over the past year or two, and that made it worthwhile. At the time I took the photos my inner Luddite was probably grumbling that I should have been using a highlighter to physically mark the pages, but in retrospect, if I'd done that, I never would have revisited all those passages again in a single sitting years later, so maybe this is actually the better way. Anyway, I am reproducing them here for, hopefully, your reading pleasure:

He walked on to the porch and stood still. He breathed in. It was young air, still and undisturbed. He looked out at the world - it was new and turning green. He raised his head. The sky unfolded, pink from the sun rising somewhere unseen. He raised his head higher. Spindle-shaped, porous clouds, centuries of laborious workmanship, stretched across the whole sky by only for a few moments before dispersing, seen only by the few who happened to throw back their heads at that minute, perhaps by Oleg Kostoglotov alone amongst the town's inhabitants.

Through the lace, the cut-out pattern, the froth and plumes of these clouds sailed the shining, intricate vessel of the old moon, still well visible.

(from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward")

A "permanent disequilibrium" - there is no ideal state for this process. There's never a golden moment in which we can sigh in satisfaction and announce that "the world has been computerized" or "the world has been geneticized". The process of technosocial change just keeps recomplicating itself. It can never be "solved" or "perfected". It has no final aim and no victory condition.

(from Bruce Sterling's "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years")

Technology forges on, not from any need of the species, but from the need of certain of its more brilliant members for interesting games to play.

(from Kenneth Brower's "The Starship and the Canoe")

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

(from Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac")