What is characteristic of logic is not a special standard of certainty, but a special level of generality. Beyond its role in policing deductive arguments, logic discerns patterns in reality of the most abstract, structural kind. A trivial example is this: everything is self-identical. The various logical discoveries mentioned earlier reflect much deeper patterns. Contrary to what some philosophers claim, these patterns are not just linguistic conventions. We cannot make something not self-identical, however hard we try. We could mean something else by the word ‘identity’, but that would be like trying to defeat gravity by using the word ‘gravity’ to mean something else. Laws of logic are no more up to us than laws of physics.
More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free-love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.
“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”
Day (like Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along") is a sad story of middle-aged disillusionment. It's about losses that range from a "low howl" to the unbearable. It's about the belated end of blithely delayed maturity and the premature end of childhood. But it's also about taking stock and making changes before it's too late. It isn't without hope.
A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.
Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.
But at its best, My Name Is Barbra confides her insecurities and a ravening hunger for fame that can never atone for the neglect she suffered as a child. She even wonders if the voice that thrilled the world is the accidental product of a deviated septum and of the air passages in her kinked nose. Let the mystery remain unsolved. What matters is that she sang, and now she no longer does. It’s some compensation to read her silent but eloquent and vociferous writing.