here's something clever from How Should We Then Live?. the book traces the flow of western thought since the romans to see how we arrived at our present day (well, 1975 present-day) ways of thinking. one of the themes is the course that humanistic thinking has taken, from the renaissance (man's ability to use his reasoning to discover ultimate meaning), through the enlightenment (breakdown of absolutes, society's ability to be perfected), to modern science and modernism (the universe as a closed system, relativism, absurdity, what is is right). the author quotes his son, who describes it like this:

Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm:

They began - I am my shepherd
Then - Sheep are my shepherd
Then - Everything is my shepherd
Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.

earlier in the book he says: At the end of his life Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen that beginning humanistically with mathematics one has only particulars and will never come to universals or meaning, but will end only with mechanics. It took humanistic thought two hundred and fifty years to arrive at the place which Leonardo had foreseen, but by the eighteenth century it had arrived. Everything is the machine, including people.

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i've been listening to a lot of pink floyd lately. i think if i'd listened to a bunch of david gilmour guitar solos instead of billy corgan guitar solos when i was learning to play, i'd be a much better guitarist than i am right now. not that billy's not awesome, he's just too much of an instinctive player; david gilmour's not nearly as fancy or all over the place, but his style is so expressive and lyrical and relatable.

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