Sadyah

Hours at home are spend primarily reading (pero dafat sulat hanggang magka-nose bleed ala Joni na naman dapat ako - for the critical essay - while waiting for Dr.CFB’s comment sa first draft ng novel ko. Bwahahaha).

From the library, I discovered Cesare Pavese, a postwar Italian fictionist. His selected major works, which I enjoyed so much with a cone of ice cream brought by Kate when she came over for our brainstorming session and some left-overs of Iloilo goodies, are translated by R.W.Flint: "The Beach," "The House on the Hill," "Among Women Only," and "The Devil in the Hills."

He has these lines: "There is only one pleasure, that of being alive. All the rest is misery."

From H.’s library, another of Richard Dawkins (Hmm, I think I can do team-teaching na on evolutionary biology, if not atheism. Bwuahahaha) - Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. It is claimed to be a love letter to science, "an attempt to counter the perception that science is cold and devoid of aesthetic sensibility and Dawkins’ writing is precisely the sort that captures the drama of science."

Here, one of his arguments is the poet Keats’ contention of Newton’s reduction of the rainbow to its prismatic colors. So did Newton diminish the beauty of the rainbow? Dawkins claims that far from it, "Newton’s unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology." (Haay, sana, ito ang tinuturo sa elementary pa lang. Siguro kung nabasa ko sa college si Dawkins, nag-Bio major ako. Nag-scientist…na creative. Bwuahahaha. Teka, kasama ba siya sa reading list sa DLSU? Sa UP? Sa Ateneo?).

The other one is William Calvin’s ( a theoretical neuro physiologist) How Brain Thinks: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now. He quotes Jean Piaget on intelligence as the one we use when we don’t know what to do. He argues that "the big issue for understanding intelligence isn’t who has more but what intelligence is, when it’s needed, and how it operates.Some of what intelligence encompasses are cleverness, foresight, speed, creativity, and how many things you can juggle at once."

But I still have to re-read this one. Putcha, di ko pa rin maintindihan how the brain thinks nga ba talaga. Hahaha. It says pa that "Intelligence is about the process of improvising and polishing on the timescale of thought and action." Ang gandang line but I think, what I expected kasi after reading this is a sort of ‘illumination" kung paano ma-heighten capacity ko to ‘mind read.’ Hahaha. Goodluck sa akin. Think I need a slice of blueberry cheesake to digest with this book this coming week:).

What I love most about these two books is the fact that these ’scientific writers’ are drawing from linguistics, literature, and anthropology other than biology and neurosciences. Kaya tuloy di ako maka-start ng critical essay ko kasi nag-aambisyon na ako ngayong mag-draw rin from these branches rather than puro lit references na lang palagi:)

Goodluck talaga sa akin:)