19. The Beautiful Brain

I contributed a short essay to a new website about the relationship between art and science, The Beautiful Brain.  It's called "Interdisciplinary Relations: On Consilience" and addresses the new theory of literature called "Literary Darwinism."  I evaluate the currently debated question of whether art is an adaptive trait or an evolutionary by-product.  I may write more pieces for the site in the future.

18. Quotes & Quotes

Lately I've been using Spanish Google because I can often track down word definitions that are hiding somewhere on the Web.  In this alternate, Iberian universe I found a great resource: a website commemorating Cajal's 150th birthday.  It even has an English translation!

Anyway, this site cited two other sites that got me excited.  They are quotation databases.  And who doesn't love a good quotation?  Many of these are from books that I have, but it's taking me a long time to work through them.  I thought I'd share:

"Remove yourself gradually, without violent breaks, from the friend for whom you represent a means instead of an end."

"You don't have enemies?  Is it that you never told the truth or never loved justice?"

"It is not worse to commit an error, but to try to justify it, instead of taking advantage of it as providential notice of our lightness or ignorance."

"Of all the possible reactions before injury, the most skilled and economical is silence."

"We scorn or hate ourselves because we do not understand because we do not take on the task of studying ourselves."

"The art of living a lot is to resign yourself to living little by little."

"Sympathy is very frequently a sentimental prejudice based on the idea that the face is the mirror of the soul.  Unfortunately, the face is almost always a mask."

"Ideas do not last long.  One must do something with them."

"Glory, in truth, is nothing other than a postponed obscurity."

"The weak succumb not for being weak, but for ignoring that they are it."

"Only the madman incapable of choosing his dreams and the sick man whom pain prevents from sleeping.


Here's to insomia . . .

17. Ochenta años and La mujer

I'm polishing my translation of "El quijote," which I think is a really interesting essay.  Cajal was undoubtedly a lover of literature, and he had an important relationship with reading.  Cajal has a few important concepts in the essay.  One is tipo de humano or "type of human."  The closest critical term that we have might be Jung's archetype.  But I decided not to use that word in translation because it would be anachronistic and it's spoiled with connotations.  I simply use "type" and think of it as a more poetic "Type-A/Type-B."  Don Quixote's type is idealist.  Cajal was himself quite quixotic and it shows in his passionate language.  Sancho Panza is Don Quixote's emotional counterweight.  In a different book, Cajal agrees with Charles Richet that "the idealism of Don Quixote is combined with the good sense of Sancho in men of genius."

Cajal acknowledges that Don Quixote is insane, disturbed.  What is the diagnosis?  Some sort of obligada abnormalidad mental "compulsory mental abnormality."  But Cajal's tone is not medical.  He successfully weaves a narrative that includes biographical information about Cervantes.

In the section titled "Cervantes, Incorrigible Quixote" Cajal credits other critics, "Cervantists," for their revelation of Cervantes' own story.  Cervantes was well-off and had high aspirations.  Then, as a soldier, he was imprisoned in Seville, where Cajal believes the genius of Cervantes was sculpted.  The last section of the essay is called "The Whip of Emotions," where Cajal argues that pain is an "awakener of souls and instigator of energies."  His last image is a strangely beautiful one:

"Comparable to swarms of marine noctilucas, whose phorsphorescence excites itself upon impact of the propeller of a ship, the lazy brain cells only ignite their low light with the whip of painful emotions.  Perhaps the privileged brain of Cervantes needed, likewise, to arrive at the tone and boiling of sublime inspiration, of the sharp sword of pain and the spectacular grieving of misery."

It is interesting to note that Cajal was educated in a school system whose motto could be described with the idiom "La letra con sangre entra."  (in other words, corporal punishment).  Cajal himself was literally imprisoned, locked in the basement in school, and so there is parallelism to Cervantes.

These are very powerful words and it's a wonderful essay and I'm still doing my best to do it justice.

I received two more Cajal books this week: El mundo vista a los 80 años" and "La mujer."  More on that later.