Aforismi: Paul Valéry ed i Sogni e Chamfort e le Passioni

Paul Valéry: Sogni
Il modo migliore per realizzare un sogno è quello di svegliarsi. 

Per cui diamoci una mossa, che è ora, anzi è pure troppo tardi.
LexMat

Chamfort: Passioni
Le passioni fanno vivere l’uomo; la saggezza lo fa soltanto vivere a lungo.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Da WikiPedia:

Res ipsa loquitur è una locuzione latina spesso utilizzata in ambito legale e significa letteralmente "cosa che parla da sola", assume il significato di cosa evidente, manifesta.
Il principio res ipsa loquitur rappresenta uno dei tanti modi di supplire alle circostanze incerte.


Davvero un ottimo Blog di analisi moderata, di cultura ed intelligenza a tutto tondo (ne vogliamo di più di credenti così al mondo): "http://puntididomanda.blogspot.it/".

Sicuramente da seguire.

LexMat

Jane, the Fox, and Me

Questo è quello che chiamo arte nello scrivere e raccontare per immagini.

LexMat


Da Amazon :

Jane, the Fox, and Me

by Fanny Britt (Author) , Isabelle Arsenault (Illustrator) , Christine Morelli (Translator) & 1 more

Hélène has been inexplicably ostracized by the girls who were once her friends. Her school life is full of whispers and lies — Hélène weighs 216; she smells like BO. Her loving mother is too tired to be any help. Fortunately, Hélène has one consolation, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Hélène identifies strongly with Jane’s tribulations, and when she is lost in the pages of this wonderful book, she is able to ignore her tormentors. But when Hélène is humiliated on a class trip in front of her entire grade, she needs more than a fictional character to allow her to see herself as a person deserving of laughter and friendship.

Leaving the outcasts’ tent one night, Hélène encounters a fox, a beautiful creature with whom she shares a moment of connection. But when Suzanne Lipsky frightens the fox away, insisting that it must be rabid, Hélène’s despair becomes even more pronounced: now she believes that only a diseased and dangerous creature would ever voluntarily approach her. But then a new girl joins the outcasts’ circle, Géraldine, who does not even appear to notice that she is in danger of becoming an outcast herself. And before long Hélène realizes that the less time she spends worrying about what the other girls say is wrong with her, the more able she is to believe that there is nothing wrong at all.

This emotionally honest and visually stunning graphic novel reveals the casual brutality of which children are capable, but also assures readers that redemption can be found through connecting with another, whether the other is a friend, a fictional character or even, amazingly, a fox.


Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/25/jane-the-fox-and-me/" :

Jane, the Fox and Me: A Gorgeous Graphic Novel about the Travails of Youth Inspired by Charlotte Brönte

by Maria Popova
 

A tender illustrated story about acceptance and belonging.

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality,” Nora Ephron wrote. “If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything,” Susan Sontag told an interviewer, articulating an experience at once so common and so deeply personal to all of us who have ever taken refuge from the world in the pages of a book and the words of a beloved author. It’s precisely this experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me (public library) — a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who, cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre. In Jane, she sees both a kindred spirit and aspirational substance of character, one straddling the boundary between vulnerability and strength with remarkable grace — just the quality of heart and mind she needs as she confronts the common and heartbreaking trials of teenage girls tormented by bullying, by concerns over their emerging womanly shape, and by the soul-shattering feeling of longing for acceptance yet receiving none.




Written by Fanny Britt and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault — who also gave us the magnificent Virginia Wolf, one of the best children’s books of 2012 — this masterpiece of storytelling is as emotionally honest and psychologically insightful as it is graphically stunning. What makes the visual narrative especially enchanting is that Hélène’s black-and-white world of daily sorrow springs to life in full color whenever she escapes with Brönte.




When Hélène reluctantly goes on a class trip, she finds herself humiliated in front of everyone. As she resigns herself to the outcasts’ tent, her fictional friend no longer provides sufficient consolation and assurance that she’s worthy of friendship.

Just then, a small red fox appears before the tent — a tender creature whose gaze gives Hélène a momentary glimpse of that soul-to-soul connection she so desires.

But it only lasts a moment — one of the mean girls scares the fox away, claiming it is rabid and leaving Hélène to believe that there must be something diseased and defective about anyone who seeks to connect with her.

But as the class returns to school, a new girl joins the outcast group, unconcerned with the circle’s social standing. Géraldine is simply content to be surrounded by people she likes who like her back, people with whom she shares that simple yet profound being-to-being connection that Hélène had found in the fox’s eyes. And, just like that, Hélène comes to see that the only way to un-believe all the hurtful things others say about her is to simply stop worrying about it all — and to believe that the deep sense of acceptance and inner peace she found in Jane Eyre and the fox springs from her own soul.

Jane, the Fox, and Me is an absolute treasure that blends the realities of children’s capacity to be cruel, the possibilities of transcending our own psychological traps, and literature’s power to nourish, comfort, and transform.

Ada: la Scienza e la Religione "al Computer"

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/10/ada-lovelace-science-religion-letter/" :

Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer on Science and Religion

by Maria Popova
 

“Everything is naturally related and interconnected.”

Science and religion have long been pitted as diametric opposites, and yet some of humanity’s greatest minds have found in science itself a rich source of spirituality — there’s Albert Einstein’s meditation on whether scientists pray, Richard Feynman’s ode to the universe, Carl Sagan on the reverence of science, Bucky Fuller’s scientific rendition of The Lord’s Prayer, Richard Dawkins on the magic of reality, and Isaac Asimov on science and spirituality. But one of history’s most poignant meditations on the subject comes from the English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), better-known as Ada Lovelace — the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Lisa Congdon for our Reconstructionists project. Click image for details.

In a 1844 letter to her Somerset neighbor, the experimenter in electricity Andrew Crosse, found in Betty A. Toole’s altogether fantastic Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (public library), Lovelace — the child of an era still characterized by extreme, all-permeating religiosity that governed nearly all aspects of public and private life — considers the spiritual quality of science, inseparable from the teaching of (at that time, religious) philosophy.

I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God’s natural works… And when I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tendency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — if not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe.
Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write on this subject…

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers is an altogether illuminating read, shedding light on the life and mind of one of history’s most deserving yet unsung pioneers of the technologies that shape our lives today.

Quel Polymath di Fritz Kahn e la sua Immaginazione Interattiva

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/20/fritz-kahn-taschen/" :

Fritz Kahn: The Little-Known Godfather of Infographics

by Maria Popova
 

How a German gynecologist transformed science into visual poetry and laid the foundations of modern information graphics.

Around the time when Austrian sociologist, philosopher, and curator Otto Neurath was building his ISOTYPE visual language, which laid the foundation for pictogram-based infographics, another infographic pioneer was doing something even more ambitious: The German polymath Fritz Kahn — amateur astronomer, medical scientist by training, gynecologist by early occupation, artist by inclination, writer, educator and humanist by calling — was developing innovative visual metaphors for understanding science and the human body, seeking to strip scientific ideas of their alienating complexity and engage a popular audience with those essential tenets of how life works. Best-known today for his iconic 1926 poster Man as Industrial Palace, Kahn inspired generations of scientific illustrators, including such legends as Irving Geis and such cultural treasures as the 1959 gem The Human Body: What It Is And How It Works. His influence reverberates through much of our present visual communication and today’s best infographics .

Fritz Kahn (1888–1968)

Now, visual culture powerhouse Taschen has captured the life’s work of this infographic pioneer in the magnificent monograph Fritz Kahn (public library) — a 6-pound tome in English, French and German that collects and contextualizes his most influential images and essays and, above all, celebrates a boundless mind that never settled for limiting itself to a single discipline, to any one area of curiosity, to the onus and hubris of specialization that our culture so vehemently and so toxically fetishizes.
In the introduction, the prolific design historian and writer Steven Heller calls Kahn and Neurath “two sides of the same pie chart,” despite the fact that they likely never met:

Each passionately sought to devise a distinct graphic design language to replace the jargon and lay waste to an ever-growing Tower of Babel.

Like Neurath, who didn’t actually create the symbols he became known for, Kahn was not an artist himself but compensated for it with the potent combination of his powers of logic and his ability to surround himself with top talent, who would execute his visions while also expanding his taste and visual literacy. Though his innovative methods were themselves a force to be reckoned with, the underlying impetus was as simple as it was profound: Kahn was just a brilliant science communicator who sought to engage the public’s imagination in popularizing science. He used his infographics as Carl Sagan did narrative and the moving image, subverting the medium — and subverting it masterfully — to the goals of the message. Heller writes:

His graphic design preferences were eclectic and included such methods as photo-collage, painting and drawing and styles like comic, surrealist, dada and more. The art of analogy was Kahn’s forte (sometimes to the extreme): he might compare an ear with a car or a bird’s feather with railroad tracks, all meant to explain ever more impenetrable phenomena by means which triggered the viewer’s imagination. Kahn employed whatever visual trick he could cobble together for the end result: popular comprehension.
[…]
The legacy of Kahn’s work has resonance now and will continue into the future.

'Man as Industrial Palace,' 1926

But how did Kahn come to shape culture so profoundly? Editors Uta von Debschitz and Thilo von Debschitz write in the introduction:

In the first decades of the 20th century, Berlin was the center for a huge variety of political, social and cultural energies, which in their explosive interaction unleashed among other things a firework display of new aesthetic forms. Fritz Kahn combined some of these innovative texts and pictorial forms into a popular scientific “overall painting of man in the light of modern science.” The work, entitled The Life of Man (1922–31), contains so many highly expressive verbal and pictorial metaphors that one reviewer said Kahn was inclined “to illustrate every statement within a picture that knocks a hole in the skull of even the most slow-witted reader” — an opening for new insights and options.

It’s rather telling that even that reviewer used such a visceral bodily metaphor to convey a conceptual idea — it was precisely in enlisting the physical to explain the metaphorical that Kahn found his greatest power. As a scientist, he understood the visual bias of our brains; as an artistically minded design-thinker, he knew how powerfully graphics could convey ideas and ideologies; as a man of medicine, he grasped the importance of visualizing the body to illuminate its inner workings.

What goes on in our heads when we see a car and say 'car' (1939)

'Daily hair growth: the human body produces 100 feet of hair substance every day. If all this growth were to converge into one single hair, that hair would grow by one inch every minute.' (1929)

Kahn was also keenly aware of the importance of pictures in education. He trawled textbooks and scientific journals for material to use in his famous “man book,” but he enlisted his artists and the design department of his publishing house in infusing the images with more life, more vibrancy, greater calls to the imagination. He developed a style based on architectural and industrial visual metaphors and began depicting the human body as a series of modern workplaces, with each organ and organ-system operated by different machines, control panels, and circuits, as in his famous Man as Industrial Palace, seeking “to depict the most important processes of life, which can never be observed directly, in the form of familiar technical processes.” (Bear in mind, he was working long before some of the most now-fundamental notions in modern science were known, decades before even the discovery of DNA.)

'The speed of thought — overtaken by technology!' (1939)

But Kahn was far from reducing a human being to mere machinery. The von Debschnitz write:

His factories, engine-rooms and laboratories do not work on their own, but are operated and driven by large numbers of workers. These human figures make visible certain activities of individual cells or organs, but they also stand for life itself, which keeps the “man machine” running. In Kahn’s pictorial world there is plenty of room alongside the demonstrable for the unconscious, the unfamiliar and the intangible. He sees metaphysics and science not as opposites but as two sides of the same coin, as the “heaven and earth of the human soul.”

'The five points in common between muscle operation and an electric doorbell circuit: (1) volition — bell button, (2) motor center — battery, (3) nerve — wire, (4) motor end-plate — interpreter, (5) muscle — clapper.' (1924, 1927)

'The cycle of matter and energy' (1926)

Kahn could also be considered a pioneer of interactive storytelling long before the technologies of interaction existed. He transformed the pictorial image from a static object to passively behold to an active invitation to engage, reimagine, and connect:

Kahn’s conceptual illustrations inverted the text-image relationship that had prevailed until then. The picture took prominence and switched from observed object to active agent, opening up new imaginary spaces for the viewer. It challenged the viewer to explore these spaces independently, to find [his or her] place in them, and develop new perspectives from there — a life-saving ability in a crisis-torn age like that of [the world war].
[…]
Apart from instruction and entertainment, edification is another important function of the illustrated factual book. Meaning, comfort, fresh perspectives, and ideally a faith that can move mountains, often form in reaction to a strong aesthetic impulse — for example, in the borderland between science and art. Kahn knew the healing effect of the “imagination” from personal and medical experience, especially in relation to observing the macro- or microcosm. … Verbal and visual images can help man (re)connect with himself, his group, the world and the universe, to find his way or place.

In a twist of tragic irony, Kahn himself followed the fate of many Jewish intellectuals and was forced to flee Germany when the Nazis took power. His books were confiscated, banned and burned, and put on a list of “damaging and undesirable writing.” His images, however, remained in use thanks to blatant plagiarism — worst of all, the science journal editor and self-professed Nazi Gerhard Venzmer ripped off Kahn’s “man book” in a similar edition that featured an extra chapter on “racial studies and racial care,” full of the expected bigoted atrocities. Fortunately, Kahn was able to sue for copyright after the end of WWII and won the case — but the experience demonstrated both the power of his images and the challenging cultural context in which he created them.

'Travel experiences of a wandering cell: the villi currents of the intestinal tract.' (1924)

Above all, however, Kahn was a kind of scientific poet who enlisted the tenets of literature and the arts in making scientific ideas not only accessible but exciting. One of the most beautiful examples of this comes from his 1924 article for the journal Kosmos, titled “Fairy-tale Journey on the Bloodstream.” In it, he extols “the drama which, since its discovery 200 years ago, has repeatedly stirred the ecstasy of all who have seen it: the circulation of the blood” and writes — sings, almost:

“What a drama, but alas, only a drama!” The microscope’s field of vision is narrowly limited and we see the blood cells arriving on one side and disappearing again on the other… where from? where to? — we don’t know […]. The researcher stops at the rigid circle of his microscope’s field of vision, but we, we are poets, and who will forbid the imagination to travel to magical realms over lands and over seas like the child with the seven swans? […] Like the hero of the “last fairy-tale” we become smaller and smaller until at last we stand microscopically tiny, mini-Lilliputians on the bank of the vein-stream, and see the cells drifting past us, as big as the barques [large sailing ships] of men. We climb up one of the cliffs that loom into the stream, and wait. Cell after cell swims past, but quick and in the middle of the stream, unattainable to our desires. At last, however, a cell-boat drifts close to us on the beach, settles askew like a ship run aground, we leap across and into it, now it tilts from side to side, we push off and sail away. We are sailing! In our cell-boat on the red-gold stream of blood! Farewell, realm of man! We are in the land of fairy-tales, the fairy-tale land of truth, above which you rough giants gap blithely away on your great feet, and we sail towards miracles, true miracles!

Fritz Kahn is itself a miracle of human imagination, wholeheartedly recommended.