“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, September 25, 2011

Realist Magic Liveblog 12

77 500 words. I'm working my way through the book, putting in clear signposts. It seems as if this book is about something after all! It's a funny stage, this. You are involved in very detailed arguments that are local to a page or two. And you're involved in looking at the big picture and trying to make the whole thing work for the first time reader. There's a strange disconnection between the two.

I'm also about to start the fourth of four books that I wanted to read, Analytic studies of causality. I'm taking notes on those and incorporating them as I go. They are hard to get through in the same way that eating dry Weetabix is a bit of a chore. I oscillate between boredom and anxiety, so I guess I may be clinically insane.

1 comment:

ulrich said...

that relationship between the micro and the macro when writing a book or phd is very difficult to handle. I would love if you could write a brief post with some of your personal clues and tools on that craft topic.