Of Puny Efforts And Making The Dragon Sneeze . . .

"We live in an era of Clorox-bottle boats and beer-can cars, far removed from the sensual world of natural materials, hard labor, or pungent smells. Post-industrial men and women have their ears plugged with cell phones or Walkmans, their eyes glued to TVs or PCs, their noses numbed by chemical air freshener.

"They are in the latest stages of a process in which their senses are dulled and their attention has shifted from the actual to the artificial or the virtual. Little by little the gap grows larger and larger between people and their roots."

- from the Introduction to Connecticut Valley Vernacular: Vanishing Landscape and Architecture by James O'Gorman



"The old monk said:

"Even the weakest of us, my son, may yet tip the scales of victory in the battle which is forever being waged between the forces of Good and Evil. No one can tell if his own puny effort, however ineffectual it may seem to him, may not be the deciding factor in the defeat of the powers of darkness.

"A tiny mayfly was once bewailing its unhappy lot. For it knew that it was doomed to perish between dawn and sundown, with no achievements to vindicate its ephemeral existence. But at that very moment Saint George, in his battle with the dragon, stood in mortal danger of being overcome by the fierce monster which had already raised a taloned foot to strike him down. The mayfly saw the champion's peril and, flying straight into the dragon's left nostril, caused it to sneeze at the crucial moment. In the next instant Saint George had pinned it to the ground with his lance.

"Well, my son, we may not all of us be able to kill a dragon, but we can at least try to make it sneeze."

- Theodore Stephanides

'Nature, For Which We Have No Code'

"One of my reasons for being optimistic is that the foundations of nature are simple.

This was brought home to me many years ago when I joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters.

But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what this third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only be something very simple.

Nature, basically, must be much simpler than she looks to us. She looks to us like a coded letter for which we have no code. To the degree to which our methods become less clumsy and more adequate and we find out nature's code, things must become not only clearer, but very much simpler, too."

- Albert Szent-Györgyi, M.D., Ph.D.
Teaching and the Expanding Knowledge