Food For Thought - Part 2

Food For Thought - Part 2

                                     Renaissance

   Modern western historians were apt thus to speak of the “Renaissance” under the spell of the same egocentric illusion that has prompted Homo Terricola in allsocieties  and ages to speak of the “earth”, the “Moon”,the  “Sun”. Such facons de parler were , of course, as unscientific as they were insidious,  as insidious as they were subjective. They were expressions of an unsophisticated observer’s uncritical assumption that his own ego is the center of the Universe and that panorama seen from his personal angle of vision is a  true picture of the Universe as it really is.

( A Study of History- Arnold Toynbee- Vol.ix-p.1)

 

   As soon as we have thus brought all the relevant phenomena in the view, we become aware that ,in using the word Renaissance as a proper name, we have being allowing ourselves to fall into the error of seeing a unique  occurrence in an event while in reality was no more than  one particular instance of a recurrent historical phenomenon. The evocation of a dead culture by the living representatives of a civilization that is still a going concern proves  to be a species of historical event for which the proper label is not the “Renaissance”, but ‘’renaissances”.(ibid – p.4)

 

 

   All things considered she was probably the most profoundly  intellectual woman that France has ever produced. And yet, strange as it may seem, when the state official came  to make out the death certificate of this eminent associate and co-worker of the most illustrious members of the French Academy of science, he designated her as rentier-annuitant ( a single woman with no profession )- not as a mathematician. Nor is this all. When the Eiffel Tower was erected, in which the engineers were obliged to give special attention to the elasticity of the materials used, there were inscribed on this lofty structure the names of seventy-two savants. But one will not find in this list the name of the daughter of genius, whose researches contributed so much towards establishing the theory of the elasticity of metals- Sophie Germain.
(H.G.Mozan- quoted in “ Fermat”s Last Theorem” – Simon Singh –p.119)

 

Mathematicians

   It is not unusual for brilliant young minds to burn out, a point noted by the mathematician Alfred Adler. “The mathematical life of a mathematician is short .Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by them, little ever be accomplished.

   “Young men should prove theorems, old men  should write books”, observed G.H.Hardy in his book “A Mathematicians Apology”. No mathematician should ever forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. To take a simple illustration, the average age of election to the Royal Society is lowest in mathematics”. His own most brilliant student Srinivasa Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of thirty-one, having made a series of outstanding breakthroughs during his youth. Despite having received very little formal education in his home village of Kumbakonam in South India, Ramanujan was able to create theorem and solutions which have evaded mathematicians in the west. In Mathematics the experience that comes with age seems less important than the intuition and daring of youth. When he posted his results to Hardy, the Cambridge professor was so impressed that he invited him to abandon his job as a lowly clerk in South India and attend Trinity College, where he could interact with some of the world’s foremost number theorists. Sadly the harsh East Anglican winters were too much for Ramanujan who contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of thirty-three.

Other mathematicians have had equally brilliant but short careers. The nineteenth-century Norwegian Niels Henkik Abel made his greatest contribution to mathematics at the age of nineteen and died in poverty, just eight years later, also of tuberculosis. Charles Hermite said of him;“ He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years:, and it is certainly  true that Abel’s discoveries still have a profound influence on today’s number theorists. Abel’s equally gifted contemporary Galois also made his breakthroughs while still a teenager and then died aged just twenty-one.

   These examples are not intended to show that mathematicians die prematurely and tragically but rather that their most profound ideas are generally conceived while they are young, and Hardy once said: “”I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.

(Fermat’s Last Theorem – Simon Singh –pp.214)

 

                  ARISTOCRATIC LIFE AND VILLAGE LIFE

   One has to be born into a cultivated society to be able to live in it all one’s life without longing to escape from the oppressive conventions and small insidious lies sanctioned by customs- from the conceit, sectarianism , hypocrisy of that society.; in a word, from vanity of vanities that dulls the senses and corrupts the minds. I was born and reared outside of it, and thanks to this favourable circumstance. I am unable to take big doses of civilization without feeling the necessity of breaking out of its bounds from time to time finding relief from its over-complexity and unwholesome refinement.

   Village life is almost as sad and insufferable as life among the intelligentsia. The best thing to do at such times is to go among the city slums, where, in spite of the dirt, life is very simple and sincere. Or to strike out down the roads and across the fields of your native land – an adventure that is greatly refreshing and demands no resources bot a pair of sturdy legs.

( Konavalov-Maxim Gorky – Selected Works – Vol. 1 – p. 254)

 

                         LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS

 

   I would have given two Franks for the chance of getting that book once into my hands, turning over the sacred yellow leaves, ascertaining the title, and pursuing with my own eyes the enormous figments which, as an unworthy heretic, it was only permitted me to drink in with my bewildered eyes. This book contained legends of the saints. Good God! ( I Speak the words reverently) What legends they were! What gasconding rascals those saints must have been, if they first boasted these exploits or invented these miracles. These legends, however, were no more than monkish extravagance , over which one laugh inwardly; they were, besides, priestly maters, and priestcraft of the book was far worse than its monkery. The ears burned on each side of my head as I listened, perforce, to tales of moral martyrdom inflicted by Rome; the dread boasts of confessors, who had wickedly abused their office trampling to deep degradation high-born ladies, making of countesses and princesses the most tormented slaves under the sun.

 (Villette- Charles Bronte- p.116)

 

   People are never satisfied. If they have a little they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.

 ( The Winner Stands Alone – Paulo Coellho)

 

              PHILOSOPHERS, POETS AND HISTORIANS

    I have noticed that philosophers as a rule live on good terms with the poets. Philosophers know that poets do not think; that disarms, softens, and delights them. But they see the historians think, and that they think differently from the philosophers. That is what the philosophers do not forgive.

(Life and Letters – Second Series –Anatole France –p. 114)

 

   Philosophers, as a rule, have small liking for history. They are ready to cast on it the reproach of proceeding without method

and without an aim. Descartes held it in contempt. Malebranch used to say that he attributed no more importance to it than to the gossip of the neighborhood.. I was lucky enough to have a chat with M.Darlu, a philosopher whose conversation is always profitable  to me, and I had a great deal of trouble in defending history against him, for he regards it as least honourable  of the works of imagination.

(The Errors of History -Second Series –Anatole France – p.10)

                                           PLAGIARISM

 

   But our contemporaries are very touchy in this respect, and it is a matter of sheer good luck if, in our days, a well-known writer is not accused at least once a year of stealing ideas,

( An Apology for Plagiarism Fourth Series – Anatole fFrance p.149)

 

   I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once completed will have no imitator… I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but al least I am different. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book.

 (The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau –p.17)

 

                                             INJUSTICE

   ..That first meeting with violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved on my heart that any thought which recall it summons back this first emotion. The feeling was only a personal one in its origins, but it has since assumed such a consistency and has become so divorced from personal interests that my blood boils at the sight or the tale of any injustice, whoever may be the sufferer and wherever it may have taken place, in just the same way as if I were myself its victim. When I read of the cruelties of a fiercer tyrant, of the subtle machinations of a rascally priest, I would gladly go and stab the wretch myself, even if it were to cost my life hundred times  over.

 ( ibid-p.31)