I've just finished rereading Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, which ends with this:
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes--one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Lovely sentence, eh?
Yes, lovely, like everything Gould wrote. He was one of my heroes when I was struggling to become a card-carrying physical anthropologist. What prompted you to read his book?
ReplyDeleteIt was completely random. I finally read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, years after enjoying The Blind Watchmaker. That then led me back to Gould and Aubrey Manning and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson and The Beak of the Finch, all books I had enjoyed many years ago.
ReplyDeleteOne advantage of getting older is being able to (re)discover things I loved years ago but had forgotten.