huff and puff

Things have finally returned to something akin to a steady state after lots of huffing and puffing around the country last week. Chicago was super-fun; got to hang out with old friends, one of whom took me to the Art Institute for the first time. I was especially taken with the miniature room which was soon and coincidentally supplemented by Stephen Millhauser's latest offering, "In the Reign of Harad the IV". Boston turned out to be sunny and warm and quite favorable, and San Francisco was gloomy and drizzly, fraught with too many slippery hills. Coming back to Los Angeles was made more pleasant because I had finally caught up on all the magazines that I'd let sit and pile up in my apartment, and felt allowed to (finally!) start reading Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.

I started the book last night, and I'm already 10 pages away from the end (it's a short 109 pager!). It's a delightful treat to hear about something so wonderful and so strange written about with such care and excitement. It also doesn't hurt that the book is actually about one of my favorite haunts in Los Angeles, and makes reference to delicious India Sweets and Spices. (Here are some more kind words about Weschler.)

But here is part of a paragraph that particularly struck me, though they were not Weschler's words:

[A]ccording to James Gleick in his introduction to Richard Feynman's recently reissued Character of Physical Law, "Physicists had hands-on experience with uncertainty and they learned how to manage it. And to treasure it--for the alternative to doubt is authority, against which science fought for centuries. 'Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,' Feynman jotted on a piece of notepaper on day, 'teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.' This became his credo: he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of our knowing."