A Commonplace Book

It is astonishing that we forget so easily that we have only a single, local view. What we see of an event may look entirely unlike what a person on the other side of the event may see or entirely unlike what we ourselves actually do see when we walk to the other side, but we imagine that these views from either side are nonetheless views of the same story, despite the manifest differences in perceptions. This is evidence of our considerable mental capacity to integrate fragmentary information, to blend it into one mental construction.

For the first two decades, "Turn of the Screw" was looked upon as a story of demonic possession. With the rise of Freud, scholars viewed the novel as an examination of Miss' repressed sexual desires, sparked when she meets the Master. Currently, Pope [Martin Pope: producer of 1999 TV adaptation of the novel] says, critics believe "Turn of the Screw" is really a chronicle of child abuse. "These children were abused by Quint and Jessel and now, in a way, are being abused by the governess," Pope says. Whatever people think is really, really terrible is what they think is going on in the novel because [Henry] James was so unspecific."

Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (see from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid, and the book Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce, is this not sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?

The fact, the thing as it is without any relation to anything else, is a matter of no importance or concern whatever: its relation to what it evinces, the fact viewed as evidence, is alone important.

...how an argument is conducted constitutes the argument itself... ideas are not separable from their articulation...

Since the universe itself is built on quantum systems such as atoms, and since all quantum systems are continually exchanging information, Lloyd concludes that the universe must be a giant quantum computer. And what does this machine compute? "It computes itself. The universe computes its own behavior."
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Throughout history, humans have interpreted the world in terms of things they know. The ancient creator gods behaved like super-humans, coupling and breeding and giving birth to the cosmos, or fashioning its elements from familiar technologies such as weaving or molding clay. Modern scientific accounts also have drawn heavily on familiar contemporary tropes: In the 17th century, the universe was seen as a vast clockwork system. By the 19th, when the study of magnetic and electrical phenomena was hot, it was reconceived as a network of invisible force fields. At the dawn of the age of digital computers, scientists speculated that it was one of these machines.

Inevitably, we see the whole through the lens of the particular.