A reader quotes concerning any apocalypse,
“I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”
Worth meditating upon, yet I cannot help but note that the scenario – falling from a tall building – has an immediacy standing out from the paper such to render it an extra dimension in the reader’s mind, and yet that very immediacy damages the metaphor’s power in that, at least in the United States today, most of us wander about the landscape with little sense of the mortality creeping up our ankles. Yet, even as I write this, I must acknowledge that today is not yesterday, and perhaps the reader of past centuries would have felt more keenly the power of the presented metaphor, whereas we have had our sensitivities blunted by the advance of medicine.
Casting about further in the essay, I see I must draw my Art Editor’s attention to this passage:
In this divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not thrive.Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how dutifully it mimics theconvolutions of our dreams and the quantums of our mental associations, can never reallyexpress what is utterly foreign to their nature, considering that the main delight of thecreative mind is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seeminglydominant generalization. When commonsense is ejected together with its calculatingmachine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. Statistics pluck up their skirts and sweep outin a huff. Two and two no longer make four, because it is no longer necessary for them tomake four. If they had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had beenmerely a matter of habit: two and two used to make four in the same way as guests invitedto dinner expect to make an even number. But I invite my numbers to a giddy picnic andthen nobody minds whether two and two make five or five minus some quaint fraction.Man at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled bygods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt soinclined. He accepted that inevitable indeterminism which they now and then introduced,called it magic, and calmly proceeded to count the skins he had bartered by chalking barson the wall of his cave. The gods might intrude, but he at least was resolved to follow asystem that he had invented for the express purpose of following it.
It should appeal to her sense that mathematics is little more than an intellectual folly.
