D Graham Burnett: Till the Light Leaps, Gebunden

Klappentext

A ranging, erudite, and intimate examination of the nature of knowledge, by a thinker and creator who defies categorization.

Attention is in short supply and high demand. But when we bring our minds and time and senses to something--an idea, an object, another person--we tap into a human capacity for observation, patience, candor, and presence. Look long enough, and we can reliably catch a bright flash, a shift in the light, even a dawning.

In Till the Light Leaps, historian of science D. Graham Burnett explores the questions that have been major drivers of his intellectual life: How do we know what we know? And how are we changed by that effort? Written during a period of radical, collective, and creative experimentation with attention, the twenty-six essays collected here span topics like technology, science, art, and religion. Together, they comprise a sustained reflection on the relationship between empirical matters and the shiver-work of the human spirit. A brief history of spectroscopy offers an occasion to consider the solemn power of fire, as well as the righteous lessons of a childhood science experiment gone wrong. Skywriting invokes military might, but also the expressionistic bravura of a solo aeronaut, Art Smith. The Greek ritual of throwing plant matter in celebration is a thread connecting animal sacrifice, confetti production, and capitalist excess. In the final, previously unpublished essay, Galway Kinnell's 1980 poem "Saint Francis and the Sow" becomes a heroic call to love and an allegory of attention in its richest sense.

Till the Light Leaps, a reference to the writings of Simone Weil, advises us to look at something "until the light leaps," whether it yields a wink or an illumination. Burnett models the work--and the pleasure--of staying present with the world, and his essays test what science can offer, even as they feel for what it cannot.