Climbing Mount Improbable

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• I HAVE JUST LISTENED TO A LECTUR IN WHICH THE topic for discussion was the fig. Not a botanical lecture, a literary one. We got the fig in literature, the fig as metaphor, changing perceptions of the fig, the fig as emblem of pudenda and the fig leaf as modest concealer of them, 'fig' as an insult, the social construction of the fig, D. H. Lawrence on how to eat a fig in society, 'reading fig' and, I rather think, 'the fig as text'. The speaker's final pensee was the following. He recalled to us the Genesis story of Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Genesis doesn't specify, he reminded us, which fruit it was. Traditionally, people take it to be an apple. The lecturer suspected that actually it was a fig, and with this piquant little shaft he ended h... (查看原文)

  人型咸鸭蛋 1赞 2011-06-30 05:22:45

• As I said, the story of the fig is, at the deepest level, the same story as for every other living creature on this planet. Though they differ in surface detail, all are variations on the theme of DNA and the 30 million ways by which it propagates itself. On our route we shall have occasion to look at spider webs—at the bewildering, though unconscious, ingenuity with which they are made and how they work. We shall reconstruct the slow, gradual evolution of wings and of elephant trunks. We shall see that 'the' eye, legendarily difficult though its evoution sometimes seems, has actually evolved at least forty and probably sixty times independently all around the animal kingdom. We shall program computers to assist our imagination in moving easily through a gigantic museum of all the ... (查看原文)

  人型咸鸭蛋 1赞 2011-06-30 05:22:45

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