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2022-7-12 09:44 |
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本帖最后由 弹钢琴 于 2022-6-18 09:59 编辑
At the turn of the 21st century, the Times Literary Supplement directed a “millennial” farce by commissioning dozens of universally acclaimed intellectuals to recommend the "Book of the Millennium". Considering the grandness of this glorious title, I suppose it must have been a book that had transformed or was still transforming the human world, which had seen three industrial revolutions and countless other monumental events in the past thousand years. This very word "Millennium" with a capital M brings to the mind something real big: esoteric treatises of Issac Newton, and Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, and Stephen Hawking; or the 32-volume, 32,640-page Encyclopædia Britannica; or the twenty tomes of the Oxford English Dictionary that chronicles the history of the English language itself.
"Not so, my lord. They're too much the man in the moon," Hamlet would say.
It was on literary writing that our most penetrating and provocative critics of the day bestowed this crowning "Millennium" title. In their minds were Montaigne's Essais, Jane Austen's Emma, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and all that. They are no doubt great writers; their canons have influenced generations of readers from different cultures worldwide. Nonetheless, their literary magnum opus doesn't have the energy to tinker with the fate of man as did Alan Turing's computers and Thomas Edison's light bulbs; their brainchild is just, when all's said and done, made-up stories! It's understandably impossible for those men/women of letters to speak highly of scientific works (I'll give credit where credit is due: one contributor did pick Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species) that are really responsible for having shaped the modern life of humanity. How can you, after all, expect people who can only read "great poems of the century" to understand the unparalleled genius of such mathematicians as Gauss and Euler whose brains harbor real wisdom, of which the Bard of Avon and his ilk couldn't even scratch the surface?
"A human being's god must also be a human being who possesses all the virtues of his race. If cows had the concept of organized religion, their god would be a perfect Cow, and similarly, circles' a perfect Circle," says a philosopher. Thus, it is not difficult to understand why the literati tended to honor a literary work as the "Book of the Millennium". |
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发表于 2022-6-16 09:03:28
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