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Thursday, December 15, 2005 |
There's another nifty exchange in that interview with Dawkins:
Speaking of artists, your field, some might say, is somewhat left-brain: science and math. Yet you often quote Yeats, for example. Who are your favorite right-brain people—poets, artists, musicians?
I love Yeats, Housman, Keats, Shakespeare, Mozart, Schubert above all, Beethoven.
Housman's pretty pessimistic.
I'm not a pessimistic person myself, but I just love his verse.
Yeats, on the other hand, is very into mysticism and the supernatural.
Quite. I sort of have to apologize for Yeats [laughs].
And another in the interview linked from Arts & Letters Daily that led me to the above:
What are your thoughts about the despair some people feel when they ponder natural selection and random mutation? …
… My book, "Unweaving the Rainbow," is an attempt to elevate science to the level of poetry and to show how one can be—in a funny sort of way—rather spiritual about science. [emphasis added]
…
If you had to name top sources for optimism and hope in a naturalistic or materialistic worldview, what would they be?
Obviously, there are other things having nothing to do with science—music, poetry, sex, love. These are all things that make life, to me, extremely worth living.
8:19:11 PM 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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