591
Morgan Library in Manhattan. Like the Akkadian tablet fragments at the Morgan,
and other ancient written entablatures, the Wellcome library has an Egyptian medical prescription on papyrus from 1100 BCE. Its focus is pain.
That merging of human need, and natural history has never ceased, and goes to
the core of a most delicate, if problematic dilemma facing humanity: our obsession
with ourselves (little wonder: pain hurts), and the corresponding inroads to our
grasping the similarly widespread agonies amply evinced by whatever lenses we
may enlist to grasp the extent of the Anthropocene. Today, while the same emphatic
links between natural history and medicine remain, and as medical technology and
treatment modalities evolve with astonishing rapidity, neurobiological insights into
the workings of the brain and, particularly, theories oriented to questions of human
behavior and our social norms, have all gravitated in large part toward studies
involving mammalian genetics. The emphasis in large measure has been the continued affirmation of a Darwinian sensibility that always claimed for humankind a
unique niche, lodged somewhere between the heart and the mind.
Translated into genetic cipher, that niche has claimed a multitude of possible
explanations for what it is Homo sapiens are, feel, think, need and express; and not
a few superlatives along the way allegedly separating us from all Others by way of
distinguishing those abundant characteristics in tune with a unique synecological
role, of complete ecosystems and the identities therein. But what is that role? What
part do we play? That has been the everlasting Koan of Mount Athos, and the persistent temptations of spirit it has elicited in all those fortunate enough to experience
its living ethos.
Every possible indication has its counter. Purpose, purposelessness; distinct,
blurred; information driven, at a loss to cope with so many neurological connections; compassionate, violent; socially organized, living in chaos from day to day;
conceptually evolved, philosophically downtrodden; hopeful, in despair; biologically novel, the slippery slopes of taxonomy; giving, taking; restrained, all- inflictive;
in sync, totally out of sorts. One cannot say the same for the mountain herself: she
is steadfast and consistent, although there is rarely a moment during which she does
not give rise to some micro-climate shift, passing clouds, snowstorms in winter up
along the summit ridge.
61.2 The Earliest Existentialist Codices
Morgan Library in Manhattan. Like the Akkadian tablet fragments at the Morgan,
and other ancient written entablatures, the Wellcome library has an Egyptian medical prescription on papyrus from 1100 BCE. Its focus is pain.
That merging of human need, and natural history has never ceased, and goes to
the core of a most delicate, if problematic dilemma facing humanity: our obsession
with ourselves (little wonder: pain hurts), and the corresponding inroads to our
grasping the similarly widespread agonies amply evinced by whatever lenses we
may enlist to grasp the extent of the Anthropocene. Today, while the same emphatic
links between natural history and medicine remain, and as medical technology and
treatment modalities evolve with astonishing rapidity, neurobiological insights into
the workings of the brain and, particularly, theories oriented to questions of human
behavior and our social norms, have all gravitated in large part toward studies
involving mammalian genetics. The emphasis in large measure has been the continued affirmation of a Darwinian sensibility that always claimed for humankind a
unique niche, lodged somewhere between the heart and the mind.
Translated into genetic cipher, that niche has claimed a multitude of possible
explanations for what it is Homo sapiens are, feel, think, need and express; and not
a few superlatives along the way allegedly separating us from all Others by way of
distinguishing those abundant characteristics in tune with a unique synecological
role, of complete ecosystems and the identities therein. But what is that role? What
part do we play? That has been the everlasting Koan of Mount Athos, and the persistent temptations of spirit it has elicited in all those fortunate enough to experience
its living ethos.
Every possible indication has its counter. Purpose, purposelessness; distinct,
blurred; information driven, at a loss to cope with so many neurological connections; compassionate, violent; socially organized, living in chaos from day to day;
conceptually evolved, philosophically downtrodden; hopeful, in despair; biologically novel, the slippery slopes of taxonomy; giving, taking; restrained, all- inflictive;
in sync, totally out of sorts. One cannot say the same for the mountain herself: she
is steadfast and consistent, although there is rarely a moment during which she does
not give rise to some micro-climate shift, passing clouds, snowstorms in winter up
along the summit ridge.
61.2 The Earliest Existentialist Codices