On Reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
During the present holiday season I have been reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. And of my doing this, of my reading, Dennett has this to say (p.509):
“Here you are, devoting several hours to reading my book. Shouldn’t we both be out raising money for Oxfam or picketing the Pentagon or writing lettters to our senators and repesentatives about various matters? Did you consciously decide, on the basis of calculations, that the time was ripe for a little sabbatical from real-world engagement, a period ‘off-line’ for a little reading?”
Well, no, none of that. I’ve never felt that reading good writers was not the best use of my time. In any case I probably left the “real world” years ago, once I was able to understand that my interests were not the interests of most people, even those closest to me, my own family.
One might even make the case (and I suppose that people have) that I’ve never been in the real world, only in a world of my own which has always seemed real enough.
As for Dennett, when I do take the time to understand what he is saying I find myself pretty much in full agreement. And I’ll have more to say about this agreement.
For the moment, on this the next to last day of the year, let me just place here in my Blog space, one of Dennett’s, and one of my favorite poems, W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, along with the Brueghel painting that inspired it. These words and image, encountered once again while reading Dennett, are what I’d like to take with me going into the new year.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
