Sublime

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”)

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

I can be clear about my biases, too. I spent the better part of a decade doing laboratory research on a tiny parasite that infects mouse brains and maybe makes the infected host mouse prefer the smell of cat urine just a little bit more than they had before. Thus, I am a mind-control parasite guy.

Perception, the neuroscientist Anil Seth writes, is “a generative, creative act.” It is “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality.” Or as the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett notes, “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the

we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

specter.

Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.