Audrey M > Recent Status Updates

I’m eating up Sumner’s science, but this chapter about her imaginary dinner with Aristotle is annoying me dreadfully.

“Avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are”…”When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that thing and you lose yourself”…”an identity [should] be flexible rather than brittle.”

(I took them slightly out of context, but I find these bits to be fascinating looks into the secular worldview because I so rarely read popular self-help)

“The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it…identity change can be a powerful force for self improvement.”

IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL!! I stole it for $0.50 at a library book sale, it has a lovely cover, smells like a very old book, superb storytelling of legends, myths, fairy tales, Indian stories, etc. The stories aren’t about music, they’re the inspiration for great works of music. This is the kind of book I’m going to give my children. It has ‘discard’ stamps inside each cover. I’m not getting rid of it.

SO FAR I’M IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK. I hate “science” books that are either romanticized memoirs or dusty textbooks, and this is neither: it’s chock full of solid studies presented in a lively way. His passion and wonder of honeybees is infectious; last night I was madly excited about how honeybees avoid asphyxiation 😂

“Every plate in this work is an example of Haeckel’s notion of principle unity of all living things. Each one of these illustrations—which for the uninitiated observer are at first only highly ornamental—was, for Haeckel, proof of his thesis. For him, the inherent form, its inherent symmetry, documented Darwin’s notion of the evolutionary development of all living things.”

Haeckel loves his radiolarians