July pfp
July
@july
Writing as a civilizational tool continues to amaze me. The tool externalizes ideas and thoughts, human consciousness as a snapshot in time. Sometimes I read books, though not in their original language, still hold a certain level of information that some person somewhere actually thought, and came up with, and wrote it down. Not only that but then that idea not only survived the noise and entropy of time (think library of Alexandria burning down, or cultural revolutions like post Renaissance Savonarola burning books) and they are still here today. Reading Cicero for example exemplifies this feeling that what we write - may matter millennia from now. And yes, if you asked Cicero or his contemporaries - would they think their writing would survive? The world that they know it, will it still exist in 2000 years time? I don’t think they would have been able to imagine, yet here all of it is. Their ideas preserved over time, fossilized in one format for another as long as humanity exists Amazing
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Sine
@sinusoidalsnail
When reading translated text, I used to feel like I was missing out. Because I assumed it wasn’t doing the original text full justice But now I actually like it. Because I can think about the extra layer of meaning that the translation probably adds I think what changed my mind about this, was the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubaiyat. Because he very openly stated that it was an extremely loose translation. And so, I liked reading that, and thinking about how there was a second interpretation happening
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