Browsing through my book shelves I pulled out a book where I had underlined several points. Curious as to why, I took some time to re-read them and now remember how I spent quite a little time musing over that book, Man's Unconquerable Mind by Gilbert Highet.
I marked one passage that stated "We are all cave men. The cave we inhabit is our own mind; and consciousness is like a tiny torch, flickering and flaring, which can at best show us only a few outlines of the cave wall..." As I write this my mind has focused on that one task. What I ate yesterday does not shoulder its way into my thoughts until, just now, I dredged it up.
This statement holds lots of truth for me, "Every human brain is filled with unused power. Out of all the billions of men and women who have lived, only a few hundred thousand have been able to employ so much of that power as to change the world. The rest have been dutiful or lazy, good or bad, sensuous or self-denying, thrifty or wasteful, cowardly or brave." Cream rises to the top.
The author liked Dante and said he felt and understood the insatiable longing for knowledge. He made Ulysses say to his sailors, "as they shrank from the horror of the unknown,
Consider well the seed from which you grew:
you were not formed to live like animals
but rather to pursue virtue and knowledge."
The summation of this author's philosophy is stated powerfully in this one long passage that I remembered him writing, "Day and night, from childhood to old age, sick or well, asleep or awake, men and women think. The brain works like the heart, ceaselessly pulsing. In its three pounds of weight of tissue are recorded and stored billions upon billions of memories, habits, instincts, abilities, desires and hopes and fears, patterns and tinctures and sounds and inconceivably delicate calculations and brutishly crude urgencies, the sound of a whisper heard thirty years ago, the resolution impressed by daily practice for fifteen thousand days, the hatred cherished since childhood, the delight never experienced but incessantly imagined, the complex structure of stresses in a bridge, the exact pressure of a single finger on a single string, the development of ten thousand games of chess, the precise curve of a lip, a hill, an equation, or a flying ball, tones and shades and glooms and raptures, the faces of countless strangers, the scent of one garden, prayers, inventions, crimes, poems, jokes, tunes, sums, problems unsolved, victories long past, the fear of Hell and the love of God, the vision of a blade of grass and the vision of the sky filled with stars." He pretty well encompasses the capability of the human brain with those words.
I marked one passage that stated "We are all cave men. The cave we inhabit is our own mind; and consciousness is like a tiny torch, flickering and flaring, which can at best show us only a few outlines of the cave wall..." As I write this my mind has focused on that one task. What I ate yesterday does not shoulder its way into my thoughts until, just now, I dredged it up.
This statement holds lots of truth for me, "Every human brain is filled with unused power. Out of all the billions of men and women who have lived, only a few hundred thousand have been able to employ so much of that power as to change the world. The rest have been dutiful or lazy, good or bad, sensuous or self-denying, thrifty or wasteful, cowardly or brave." Cream rises to the top.
The author liked Dante and said he felt and understood the insatiable longing for knowledge. He made Ulysses say to his sailors, "as they shrank from the horror of the unknown,
Consider well the seed from which you grew:
you were not formed to live like animals
but rather to pursue virtue and knowledge."
The summation of this author's philosophy is stated powerfully in this one long passage that I remembered him writing, "Day and night, from childhood to old age, sick or well, asleep or awake, men and women think. The brain works like the heart, ceaselessly pulsing. In its three pounds of weight of tissue are recorded and stored billions upon billions of memories, habits, instincts, abilities, desires and hopes and fears, patterns and tinctures and sounds and inconceivably delicate calculations and brutishly crude urgencies, the sound of a whisper heard thirty years ago, the resolution impressed by daily practice for fifteen thousand days, the hatred cherished since childhood, the delight never experienced but incessantly imagined, the complex structure of stresses in a bridge, the exact pressure of a single finger on a single string, the development of ten thousand games of chess, the precise curve of a lip, a hill, an equation, or a flying ball, tones and shades and glooms and raptures, the faces of countless strangers, the scent of one garden, prayers, inventions, crimes, poems, jokes, tunes, sums, problems unsolved, victories long past, the fear of Hell and the love of God, the vision of a blade of grass and the vision of the sky filled with stars." He pretty well encompasses the capability of the human brain with those words.
