WASHINGTON SQUARE (HENRY JAMES) AND GEOMETRY PRINCIPLES

"And shall you not relent?"

"Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial."

"Doesn't geometry treat of surfaces?" asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know, was clever, smiling.

"Yes, but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are my surfaces; I have taken their measure."

Well done Henry James! It´s no a novelty that he is a terrific genius, and in this text he proves it by inserting scientific contents in Literature in a charming and smart way. He achieves with this that the intelligence of some character shines although what really shines is, of course, his own intelligence.

We are going to clarify, however, that in the text we are told about Plane Geometry not Space or Three-dimensional one, because in Space Geometry does exists depth.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (G.K. CHESTERTON), ELEMENTARY PARTICLES, PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT AND SPIRITUALISM

From my point of view this text is not so much about scientists in the old times being less accurate as about the fact that the things they studied were as mysterious as ectoplasms. It´s also remarkable that physicists dealt with spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century when Physics was such an amazing field, from the point of view of a late-20th-century student.

When I was quite a boy, practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm exactly as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write, the thing has grown into a considerable religious movement, by the activity of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, much less of a scientist, but much more of a journalist.

GENERATION A (DOUGLAS COUPLAND) AND THE CLARITY WHICH PEOPLE EXPRESS THEIR POSITION ABOUT MATHS

I said to Zack: “So your story was about numbers?”

“Yes. And faith and hope, too. Nothing like lots of faith and hope to make a story a timeless classic. Dollops of faith; countless extra servings of hope.”

“Brother. So, are you number smart or something?”

“Number smart? Actually, I hate the fucking things. But when I look at them, they don’t make noises in my head the way words and letters do. It’s kind of peaceful, actually. In math class I’d just stare at equations and visit my happy place until the bell rang.”

“I hated math.”

We all nodded our heads, while Serge shook his in dismay.

People has a very clear position about Math: they like it or hate it. It´s also a very early decision in life, from childhood you have no doubt about it. And it´s a fact without half-measures, very few people say: I don´t mind about Maths, it is not my favourite subject but I don´t hate it.

Something similar happens with the father role in memories or autobiographies: they are excellent persons, even genius, or the are evil people who destroyed the author´s childhood. It´s vey infrecuent to find something like ‘ mi father was a regular man’, or like the Manuel Alcántarás verses:

“He was good or bad, the same than anyone…”

I, like Serge in the tex, also shook my head in dismay