Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown - Hardcover

Gould, Stephen Jay

 
9780609600764: Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0609600761 ISBN 13: 9780609600764
Verlag: Random House Inc, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

The noted naturalist and author of Dinosaur in a Haystack sheds new light on humankind's fascination with the approaching millennium, offering a collection of scientific and historical essays on the millennium and its rational and spiritual significance. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists and most acclaimed science essayists of the 20th century. He died in May 2002. He was the author of numerous books, including The Lying Stones of Marrakech and Questioning the Millennium.

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stioning the Millennium, Stephen Jay Gould applies his wit and erudition to one of today's most pressing subjects:  the significance of the millennium.

In this beautiful inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers.  Refreshingly reasoned, erudite, and absorbing, the book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event:
First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted?  How did the name for a future thousand year reign of Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history?  

When does the new millennium begin:  January 1, in the year 2000 or 2001?  

Finally, why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia?
As always, Gould brings

Aus dem Klappentext

stioning the Millennium</b>, Stephen Jay Gould applies his wit and erudition to one of today's most pressing subjects: the significance of the millennium.<br><br>In this beautiful inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers. Refreshingly reasoned, erudite, and absorbing, the book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event:<br>First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted? How did the name for a future thousand year reign of Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history? <br><br>When does the new millennium begin: January 1, in the year 2000 or 2001? <br><br>Finally, why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia?<br>As always, Gould brings

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I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature. Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more difficult - in other words, of both the external pitfalls to knowledge. Yet we press on regardless - and we do manage to get somewhere.

I think that I love humanity all the more - the scholar's hang-up, I suppose - when our urge to know transcends mere practical advantage. Societies that both fish and farm need to reconcile the incommensurate cycles of years and lunations. Since nature permits no clean and crisp correlation, people had to devise the cumbersome, baroque Metonic Cycle. And this achievement by several independent societies can only be called heroic.
        
I recognize this functional need to know, and I surely honor it as a driving force in human history. But when Paleolithic Og looked out of his cave and up at the heavens - and asked why the moon had phases, not because he could use the information to boost his success in gathering shellfish at the nearby shore, but because he just wanted to resolve a mystery, and because he sensed, however dimly, that something we might call recurrent order, and regard as beautiful for this reason alone, must lie behind the overt pattern - well, then calendrical questions became sublime, and so did humanity as well.
        
If we regard millennial passion in particular, and calendrical fascination in general, as driven by the pleasure of ordering and the joy of understanding, then this strange little subject - so often regarded as the province of drones or eccentrics, but surely not of grand or expansive thinkers - becomes a wonderful microcosm for everything that makes human beings so distinctive, so potentially noble, and often so actually funny. Socrates and Charlie Chaplin reached equal heights of sublimity.

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609600761
ISBN 13 
9780609600764
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
190
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Verantwortliche Person
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