"But when everything is strange..."

"But when everything, every single thing is strange, it takes forever to make things familiar." Bradbury

This is a great quote from one of Bradbury's short stories. He's writing about life on a different planet, but it struck me how this is sometimes true when reading what certain people write. You read a paragraph, but your frame of reference is nil. Perhaps it is a technical area in which you have little or no expertise, or perhaps you're reading about an environment that is completely new to you with new, complicated vocabulary. Or it could be someone's way of expression that is so convoluted that you have to read what's written several times before you move from what was strange to a level of understanding. It could even apply to a political point of view that seems so strange that it is hard to make it feel familiar.

Anyway, I like the Bradbury quote, simple at first in how it's stated, but really reverberating in the depths and very applicable to a variety of situations. I would say that empathetic capacity involves a willingness to make the strange, familiar.

I would say that empathetic capacity involves a willingness to make the strange, familiar.
That's a beautiful phrase, a prayer, a way of life, a state of grace to strive for.
May I quote you?

> I would say that empathetic capacity involves a willingness to make the strange, familiar.

Sure but...familiarity also breeds contempt.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion - F. Bacon

That's a beautiful phrase, a prayer, a way of life, a state of grace to strive for.

Yes, it is provocative, Owlbow.

Arthur C. Clarke also said something profound about "strange" but it turns out it wasn't Clarke who first said it [as Clarke himself acknowledges in this interview with "Wired" magazine in 2003 - the 25th Anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey"]:

I'm always paraphrasing J.B.S. Haldane: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

In the same interview, Arthur Clarke also said something "strange" which gives us an insight into his own mind:

Though Clarke generally despises interviews, he was excited about appearing in Wired - although he wryly insisted, after looking over the premier issue of the magazine, that "a crucial letter in the title has been transposed."

Arthur Clarke On Life
Wired, July/August 2003 [Sri Lanka]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/clarke_pr.html

i read, one of success of humans, is they, unlike other animals, do not suit themselves to an environment, but rather, create environments that suit them (from materials at hand.)

i think too, humans have an amazing capacity to accept new environments--and to quickly come to terms coping with them.

We have all seen photo's of flooded areas, where hours after the flood, the main road of town, instead of being a street, has become a 'channel'--and out of 'no where '--well, in reality, out of garages, and sheds, and other outbuilding--have come canoes, rowboats, inflatables, and small outboarders, and now the police are cruising in boats..as it it was the most normal thing..

and, in somes it is! it becomes the new normal for the duration of the flood, and then roads go back to being roads, and the police go back to driving cruisers. we switch between one mode of normal, into another, and back again, almost easily.
on the fateful day in september a few years ago, there was very little panic. thousand of people, evacuated from buidings and headed 'away' (my building was a 1/4 mile away and evacuated).--

subways weren't running nor for the mostpart, buses. bridges and tunnels were closed. there wasn't any panic, just a steady, somber parade of people moving north. (about the only way you could go!)

people talked with each other, and interacted, in quiet ways.

NYers' have dealt with blackouts, and other disasters before.. no one looks forward to a 15 mile walk home.. but we trudge along, accustom to the fact that things break down, in a rather catastrofic way, if not regularly, at least several times in one lifetime.

that day was perhaps a 1000 year experience--just as floods are measured in such likelyhoods--with a certain level of flooding occurs every 10 years, every 100 years or so there is an exceptional flood, and every 1000 years, a flood beyond all known proportion.

just as people who live near rivers learn to live with floods, so, NYers learn to live with 'unusual' inconvienences.

Thank you for your insight, Helen. I especially like your line: �people talked with each other, and interacted, in quiet ways.� It strikes me as a wonderful string of words.

What rare insight Wordwind! Familiarity is a fundamental necessity of living, ergo, we must become familiar with our sensorial environment in order to move about it and eat and reproduce. But then your further extrapolation from Bradbury's sentence was just brilliant, viz. Or it could be someone's way of expression that is so convoluted that you have to read what's written several times before you move from what was strange to a level of understanding. It could even apply to a political point of view that seems so strange that it is hard to make it feel familiar.

Every man's conflict: The need to go through life surrounded by the familiar chant of the in-group, and the equal need to find new understandings about yourself and life by seeking out the strange.

It ain't easy to develop a taste for Beethoven when all your friends dig rap and hip hop.

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"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

...for to make a claim about what we can't imagine is to that degree to imagine it.

Your logic is faulty, inselperer, consider the meaning of "imagine".

To imagine is to regroup pieces of the the known Universe into arrangements never before made by you and maybe not by any other man...at this time. We cannot imagine otherwise.

But to imagine that there will come things that will then allow us to imagine differently is not imagining the actuality of it but is only hypothesizing that we can't imagine the strange world ahead with our present set of imaginators. (I made the word "imaginators" up, but you known what I mean.)

I would say that empathetic capacity involves a willingness to make the strange, familiar.

I like this sentence.

I do beleive that we do need a little strange in our life, or else, it would be tedious. I think it is the constant exposure to different and new that keeps us growing mentally and emotionally.

In reply to:
I think it is the constant exposure to different and new that keeps us growing mentally and emotionally.

...probably that's part of why we come here. And not a glazed-over eye in sight!

"faulty"

To imagine that a time will come whose composition is, in its specifics, unimagineable to us is to imagine the familiar and the fruit of experience, and so I stick with "irony."

"To imagine that a time will come whose composition is, in its specifics, unimagineable to us is to imagine the familiar and the fruit of experience, and so I stick with "irony."
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Nice construction and certainly seemingly ironic.

But then if we use your reasoning the sentence "I can imagine "nothingness" would also be true.

And what then would be this "nothingness"?
The human mind cannot conceptualize the "absence of everything" without a "something"
to contrast it, so what then would we be imagining?

The logic here might be paradoxical but it could not correctly be said to be ironic.
There is a subtle difference.

In reply to:
The human mind cannot conceptualize the "absence of everything" without a "something"

I'm not human.

"if we use your reasoning"

I don't follow you.

[ I'm not human ]

That is a given, Wordwind, but remember,
there are rough-cut people in this big World that don't believe that you are superhuman.
But we do.

To imagine that a time will come whose composition is, in its specifics, unimagineable to us is to imagine the familiar and the fruit of experience, and so I stick with "irony".
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"To imagine the unimagineable" is the cruix.

My example...

"To conceptualize 'nothing', " is the analogy.

Semantically both statements are meaningless.

Yet both statements have a function in describing
a state that can't be described, as a condition of contrast for clearer understanding.

Right?

both statements have a function in describing a state that can't be described, as a condition of contrast for clearer understanding.

Nothing could be clearer.

Pour three fingers of Johnny Walker Sharp Toes in a six oz. tumbler...neat!
Hold your hat and drink it down.
Listen now, young Faldage, understanding calls and your mind is clear.

"Right?"

Right.

So, here is a question of authorial intent. Bradbury, an American, may have been ironic without knowing it. And a Brit might wag at the meta-irony and call it proof that 'yankees don't get irony'. Speaking of which, can anyone tell me the Etymology of 'yankee.'

Etymology of Yankee? A much vexed question that one, as I'm sure you know! Here's part of the Random House take on it:

"Most scholars now believe that Yankee comes from Dutch although there is disagreement about which Dutch word is the source.

Random House Webster's College Dictionary suggests that Yankee comes from Jan Kees (or Jan Kaas), 'John Cheese', a nickname for the Dutch. The -s at the end sounded like a plural to English speakers and was dropped. Proponents of this theory believe that the name was first applied to Dutch pirates by the English and later used by the New York Dutch for their Connecticut neighbors. H.L. Mencken favored this explanation, noting that the New Englanders' "commercial enterprise outran their scruples."

The other popular theory, favored by the OED, is that Yankee comes from Dutch Janke (or possibly Jantje), 'Little John', the diminutive of Jan, which was used as a derisive nickname by either the English or the Dutch in the New England states."

<<Most scholars now believe that Yankee comes from Dutch although there is disagreement about which Dutch word is the source.>>

I'm partial to that explanation, because it makes me laugh.

Interesting, the table turning in Mencken's fav'd.

Thanks

Well, I'm glad we don't have to spell damn Jantjes.

yeahbut, it'd slow down the graffiti artists all over the world if they had to stop and think before writing "Jantjes go home!"