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Till the Light Leaps: Essays on Playing Attention
Hardcover
Letters & EssaysTechnology & EngineeringSports General
Publisher Price: $30.00
ISBN13: 9780226857879
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Mar 22 2027
Pages: 416
Language: English
A ranging, erudite, and intimate examination of the nature of knowledge, by a thinker and creator who defies categorization.
Attention is in short supply and high demand. But when we bring our minds and time and senses to something--an idea, an object, another person--we tap into a human capacity for observation, patience, candor, and presence. Look long enough, and we can reliably catch a bright flash, a shift in the light, even a dawning.
In Till the Light Leaps, historian of science D. Graham Burnett explores the questions that have been major drivers of his intellectual life: How do we know what we know? And how are we changed by that effort? Written during a period of radical, collective, and creative experimentation with attention, the twenty-six essays collected here span topics like technology, science, art, and religion. Together, they comprise a sustained reflection on the relationship between empirical matters and the shiver-work of the human spirit. A brief history of spectroscopy offers an occasion to consider the solemn power of fire, as well as the righteous lessons of a childhood science experiment gone wrong. Skywriting invokes military might, but also the expressionistic bravura of a solo aeronaut, Art Smith. The Greek ritual of throwing plant matter in celebration is a thread connecting animal sacrifice, confetti production, and capitalist excess. In the final, previously unpublished essay, Galway Kinnell's 1980 poem Saint Francis and the Sow becomes a heroic call to love and an allegory of attention in its richest sense.
Till the Light Leaps, a reference to the writings of Simone Weil, advises us to look at something until the light leaps, whether it yields a wink or an illumination. Burnett models the work--and the pleasure--of staying present with the world, and his essays test what science can offer, even as they feel for what it cannot.
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