More Oakland cranes"What a splendid thing it is to sleep and dream, just think! The whole of our life is a dream and the best thing in it is, again, dreaming."
"A sort of spiritual hush has come upon me since I moved in here; I don't want to do anything, I don't want to see anyone, there's nothing to dream about, I'm too idle to have ideas-but I'm not too idle to think: these are two different things…"
- Ivan Turgenev Faust
I've been reading this book: The Modern Mind: An intellectual history of the 20th Century by Peter Watson, who wrote an excellent article copied below:
History shows that true innovation has disappeared from our society
Peter Watson Sunday May 22, 2005 The Observer
Next month, in Christie's big sale of valuable books and manuscripts, the highlight is a rare offprint of the famous volume 17 of Annalen der Physik, in which Albert Einstein's three great ideas - on the special theory of relativity, the law of mass-energy equivalence (E=mc2), and the Brownian Theory of motion - were revealed. The occasion marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein's breakthrough.
But the sale of Einstein's papers recalls to mind that they were not the only remarkable event of that remarkable year. Matisse painted Luxe, calme et volupté and Les Fauves were born. Cézanne produced Les Grandes Baigneuses, whose lozenges of colour first pointed to cubism and abstraction. Lenin published Two Tactics, EM Forster wrote Where Angels Fear to Tread, the first regular cinemas opened, Richard Strauss unveiled Salomé and Freud followed The Interpretation of Dreams with his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. The Austin motor company (remember that?) was formed, the first motor buses in London appeared, the first neon signs.
The year 2005 can't begin to compete with 1905 in terms of important innovations. Last week's announcement that British and Korean scientists have successfully cloned human embryos only reinforces the point. What else of real importance has happened this year?
We flatter ourselves that we live in interesting times but isn't this just one more example of that particular blindness our solipsistic age has about itself, a more severe form of the disease whereby Princess Diana can be rated the most important (or was it second-most important) Briton ever?
