mind & brain

Biology gives you a brain.  Life turns it into a mind.


Jeffrey Eugenides

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Earth Is Closing On Us"

The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was     our mother So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of those who'll throw our children Out of the windows of the last space. Our star will hang up in mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the head of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. Mahmoud Darwish
Read more

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea...
Read more

Addonizio, "Knowledge"

Even when you know what people are capable of, even when you pride yourself on knowing, on not evading history, or the news, or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now there are times it strikes you anew, as though you’d spend your whole life believing that humanity was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought, like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will, never chanted perversely, almost gleefully, the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes— solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short — even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed  even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,  which you had thought no longer existed, did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,  irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid that there is...
Read more