Strange article by Czeslaw Milosz about faith'n'stuff. (By the way, I cannot more heartily recommend CM's poetry. I've spent a great deal of time with it, but not enough. Also, he has worked closely with Robert Hass, among others, to generate faithful, poetic translations, which helps to ease the mind)
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Uh, I've had to explain my stance on this to so many people over the years that it only makes sense to share it, since it appears to be an unusual opinion:
So many people I know, particularly of the 'hippy' persuasion, draw a strong dichotomy between natural and artificial. I have a hard time with this. I think, by natural, they usually mean healthy, or harmonious with the Earth's eco-system or some-such, and by artificial they usually mean human or by-product of human endeavor. My argument is simple: humans are animals (weird ones, but hey) so we're a product of nature, then so must our utensils and structures also be. Here's my pull-quote: if a honeycomb is natural, if a beaver dam is natural, then isn't a skyscraper?
Could I possibly be wrong here?
[don't misunderstand, I'm not arguing an ethical equivalence, I'm trying to erase natural as an ethicist's term]
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Two experts, to explicate Meaning,
Penned a text called "The Meaning of Meaning",
But the world was perplexed,
So three experts penned next
"The Meaning of Meaning of Meaning".
- Douglas Hofstadter
