Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as th...e blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The inside of an Englishman's head can be very fairly compared to a Murray's Guide: a great many facts, but few ideas; a great dea...l of exact and useful information, statistics, figures, reliable and detailed maps, short and dry historical notes, useful and moral tips by way of preface, no all-inclusive vision, and no relish of good writing. It is a collection of good, reliable documents, a convenient body of memoranda to get a man through his journey without help. A Frenchman requires an agreeable shapeliness in every piece of writing and every article about him. The Englishman can be satisfied with utility. A Frenchman enjoys ideas as such and for their own sake; an Englishman regards them as instruments of foresight or mnemonics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not... as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been asked to give some words of advice for young women entering library/information science education. Does anyone ever take... advice? The advice we give is usually what we would do or would have done if we had the chance, and the advice that's taken, if ever, is often what we wanted to hear in the first place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of a...ll kinds of filth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »