Biophilia and reading poetry
One of Salvador Dali's watercolor paintings of a botanical engraving
As we've now officially entered summer I can finally spend more time outside. That is, if it stops raining and hailing. We've already had the rainiest June since 1882, and the month isn't even over yet. I stumbled upon this article about humans needing exposure to nature, and while I agree on the first premise, I'm not so sure about all of the conclusions. Designing nature into denser human environments sounds nice, but I don't like the idea of treating nature as a technology or a building block with which we can domineer or control the same way as bricks or cement. It sounds a little bit too much to me like subverting nature as a method rather than appreciating nature as a revelation. What do you think? Should nature be integrated into architectural design more, and if so, how should it be done?
The hail recently did a number on our poor plants. This is a picture of a planter with some coleus, geraniums, and creeping jennys above picture is one of the most decimated. I suppose I can't complain too much, considering that other people at Red Rocks had broken bones due to hail, and there was even a tornado just south of us.
We should read poetry, because:
Reading literature offers us profound solidarity with an author and admits us to a broader human community but it also holds up a mirror that allows us to see aspects of ourselves more clearly than we could have before. If the self can be put out of view for a moment it will return in sharper definition. In reading literature rightly, when the text works upon us, the self is both expanded and articulated.
The article isn't strictly about poetry, but more about literature, but I would agree with the sentiment of this quote from Brodsky:
The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry ... poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it if offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation - especially one on paper.
And from Hannah Anderson's book on recovering the art of discernment, where she goes on to state that "It [poetry] teaches the knack of omitting the self evident, emphasis on detail, and the technique of anticlimax."
Finally, I can't miss my chance to throw something about "AI" in, considering its importance not only in my day job but in the wider technical community. Recently Marc Andreessen wrote a lengthy article about "Why AI Will Save the World", and I found that Alan Jacobs did a good job of critiquing the argument by annotating the article with notes (pdf). If you're interested in some of the shortcomings of discussion about "AI" in general, check it out.