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Quote by Robert Wright

“Для психолога может показаться очевидным, что эволюция рефлексивного, самоосознающего мозга освободит нас от базового диктата нашего эволюционного прошлого. Для эволюционного биолога, очевидным является совершенно противоположное — что человеческий мозг эволюционировал не для того, чтобы изолировать нас от правил выживания и репродукции, но для того, чтобы следовать им более эффективно, более точно. Мы произошли от видов, самцы которых силой овладевают самками; сейчас самцы нашего вида шепчут самкам разные приятные глупости, и шептания вполне могут подчиняться той же самой логике, что и насилие — логике манипулирования самкой в интересах самца, и эта форма манипулирования служит той же функции.”

Book:Моральное животное

Work

Моральное животное

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Author

Robert Wright

Robert Wright, born in 1957, is an accomplished journalist known for his work in politics, science, and culture. His career has spanned various fields, and he is recognized for his in-depth investigative reporting and unique analytical perspective. Wright's work often delves into complex social and philosophical issues. more

“It is noteworthy that about the year 1200, the Nibelungenlied, with its poetic version of the Siegfried story, was written, probably in Austria. At approximately the same time or within seven decades, The Saga of the Volsungs was compiled in Iceland with far fewer chivalric elements than its German counterpart. Almost all the Old Norse narrative material that has survived—whether myth, legend, saga, history, or poetry—is found in Icelandic manuscripts, which form the largest existing vernacular literature of the medieval West. Among the wealth of written material is Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a thirteenth century Icelandic treatise on the art of skaldic poetry and a handbook of mythological lore. The second section of Snorri’s three-part prose work contains a short and highly readable summary of the Sigurd cycle which, like the much longer prose rendering of the cycle in The Saga of the Volsungs, is based on traditional Eddic poems (Jesse Byock)”

Nibelungs

Book:The Saga of the Volsungs

Source: The Saga of the Volsungs

“No one can say exactly when the process of combining the different historical, legendary, and mythic elements into a Volsung cycle began, but it was probably at an early date. By the ninth century the legends of the Gothic Jormunrek and those of the destruction of the Burgundians had already been linked in Scandinavia, where the ninth-century “Lay of Ragnar” by the poet Bragi the Old treats both subjects. Bragi’s poem describes a shield on which a picture of the maiming of Jormunrek was either painted or carved and refers to the brothers Hamdir and Sorli from the Gothic section of the saga as “kinsmen of Gjuki,” the Burgundian father of King Gunnar. The “Lay of Ragnar” has other connections with the Volsung legend. The thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson identifies the central figure of the lay, whose gift inspired the poem in his honor, with Ragnar Hairy Breeches, a supposed ancestor of the Ynglings, Norway’s royal family. Ragnar’s son-in-law relationship to Sigurd through his marriage to Sigurd’s daughter Aslaug (mentioned earlier in connection with stave church carvings) is reflected in the sequence of texts in the vellum manuscript: The Saga of the Volsungs immediately precedes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar’s saga, in turn, is followed by Krákumál (Lay of the Raven), Ragnar’s death poem, in which Ragnar, thrown into the snakepit by the Anglo-Saxon King Ella, boasts that he will die laughing. The Volsung and Ragnar stories are further linked by internal textual references. It is likely that the The Saga of the Volsungs was purposely set first in the manuscript to serve as a prelude to the Ragnar material. The opening section of Ragnar’s saga may originally have been the ending of The Saga of the Volsungs. Just where the division between these two sagas occurs in the manuscript is unclear. Together these narratives chronicle the ancestry of the Ynglings—the legendary line (through Sigurd and Ragnar) and the divine one (through Odin). Such links to Odin, or Wotan, were common among northern dynasties; by tracing their ancestry through Sigurd, later Norwegian kings availed themselves of one of the greatest heroes in northern lore. In so doing, they probably helped to preserve the story for us.” (Jesse Byock)”

Nibelungs

Book:The Saga of the Volsungs

Source: The Saga of the Volsungs

“I did Barbie’s dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York. Still, that would’ve been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he’d been following my graphic novel Signal to Noise—which was being serialized in The Face magazine at the time—and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, A Child Across the Sky. He concluded, “We’re like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel.” I wrote back and said, “I think you’re right. What’s more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading Bones of the Moon, but I keep thinking I ought to return to it.” Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: “Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story.” With that encouragement, I began creating A Game of You.”

Writing Radio Interview Neil Gaiman Ezra Pound Jonathan Carroll

Book:The Sandman Companion

Source: The Sandman Companion