Fire and Knowledge

You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

Translators of poetry must accept failure as the primary condition of their work. They must settle, at best, for second best: Their translations must succeed or fail as new poems in their own language which at the same time serve as approximations or shadows of the original poems. Nobody, I think, has ever believed that there was an equation between a translation and the original.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

I think agriculture the most honorable, because the most independent, of all professions.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 664

Intelligent Design’s proposal of the intervention of supernatural forces to account for complex multi-component biological entities is a scientific dead end. Outside of the development of a time machine, verification of the ID theory seems profoundly unlikely.

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 187

We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domains. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “William Jennings Brian’s Last Campaign” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 430

We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.

“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something – a much-loved pet perhaps – salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.

Happily, this all suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes – burned and ice cream – so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 15

I’ve written a short essay on the Desiring God Blog about Christians and reading.

The other day I saw our kitten yawn and I realized that not only does this little thing yawn like us, but it also has ridges on the top of its mouth. Does anyone know why we have ridges on the top of our mouths? If so, please enlighten me.

Update: Nick gives us the answer: they “help the tongue manipulate food for digestion, prior to swallowing. In other words, they act as tread so the food item doesn’t go slipping around all over your mouth.” It seems to work pretty well!

By the way, this shows a current weakness of digital information. I couldn’t find information on this because I didn’t know what to look for — searching Google for “ridges on mouth” or similar terms came up with nothing relevant. The term I was looking for, Nick had to provide. (Which was, by the way “transverse palatine folds” or “friction ridges.”) Without knowing the context, I couldn’t find the information. Thanks, Nick!