Jose Rafael

“The earth is a huge ball which nothing holds up in space except its own motion and magnetism, and we conscious things who occupy it believe we have to move too, in our own space. We can’t allow ourselves to lie down and not do our share and imitate the greater entity. You see, this is our attitude. But now look at Willatale, the Bittah woman; she had given up such notions, there was no anxious care in her, and she was sustained. Why, nothing bad happened! On the contrary, it all seemed good! Look how happy she was, grinning with her flat nose and gap teeth, the mother-of-pearl eye and the good eye, and look at her white head! It comforted me just to see her, and I felt that I might learn to be sustained too if I followed her example. And altogether I felt my hour of liberation was drawing near when the sleep of the spirit was liable to burst.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“Ancient meteorology covered a much broader field than its modern counterpart.” The difference from the modern era lies in lumping versus splitting areas of historic inquiry, including what today would be seen as culture versus nature: it is a much more holistic vision. Thus, Roger French writes, “The people whom scientific historians see as practising science in the more or less distant past . . . called it philosophy and strove rather to stress the unity of knowledge than the separateness of its parts. Part of it was concerned with the natural world, but this part was not marked off from the others by any strict boundaries.”6”
― Michael R. Dove, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History

“Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. . . . All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. . . . How was the Classical age able to define this realm of ‘natural history,’ the proofs and even the unity of which now appear to us so distant, and as though already blurred?”1 In short, when we look back from the vantage point of contemporary academia, we can have only a “blurred” vision of those fields that have vanished. Foucault is describing an ontological shift: captive as we are to our own ontologies, anything else appears as but a blur. This blur, this strangeness, Foucault suggests, is worthy of our attention.”
― Michael R. Dove, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History

“Yet you are right for the long run, and good exchanged for evil truly is the answer. I also subscribe, but it appears a long way off, for the human specie as a whole. Perhaps I am not the one to make a prediction, Sungo, but I think the noble will have its turn in the world.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King