Apologies! No original idea from my side this week. Scroll down to read this week’s posts from my blog. But first:

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• On existing vs. creating:

“[Man] has what no other animal possesses, a jigsaw of faculties which alone, over three thousand million years of life, make him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

— Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)

• If you’re busy thinking too much and see no results:

“We don’t think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

— Richard Rohr

Though not something I’d literally agree with, the quote does make sense in another light.

• A profound book I’m reading:

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

I find it hard to describe such a deep book. The Ascent of Man traces the development of human society through our understanding of science. It discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature.

As Bronowski writes in chapter 2 ‘The harvest of the seasons’ describing the power of the sickle created with the advent of settled agriculture “from which all physics, all science takes of”:

A technology like that, physical knowledge like that, comes to us out of every part of the agricultural life so spontaneously that we feel as if the ideas discover man, rather than the other way about.

I agree with what Richard Dawkins had to say in the Foreword of this book:

There’s a quotable aphorism on every page of this book, something to treasure, something to stick on your door for all to use, an epitaph, perhaps, or the gravestone of a great scientist.

One of the best pieces of popular science literature I’ve come across. Read it.

• On writing for yourself:

• My new favorite movie:

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Watch it on Disney+ here.

Posts from my blog this week

• “Where am I going to use all this in my life?”:
  Another teacher/student dialogue on being the unreasonable fool upon whose critical nature all progress depends.

• You don’t know what you’ve got until its gone:
  On "chasing" happiness, taking the most important things for granted, not knowing what you've got until losing it and a stoic negative visualization technique.

Thank you for reading.

Just know that by subscribing to my newsletter and telling more people about it, you help me out.

And if you want to be friends, you can reply to this email or DM me on Twitter.

Onward,
Arjun

Blog | Twitter