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ricardienneFrom Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5.11.34:
The other thing I've been reading today (well, apart from 2.5 pages of a really tedious German article about the origins of "the garment of vanity" (lit: "the chiton of empty glory") (it's the last piece of clothing/passions philosophers remove, in case you were wondering)) is a book of short stories and poetry of John M. Ford: he likes his sci-fi/modernized antiquity, and I do too! The poetry I am not so into, with a few exceptions. The couplets about various topics in physics are very nice. An excerpt:
open/oscillating universe
So will it stop, or not? The answer tells
Much less about the stars than of ourselves.
Planck epoch
One flash when gravity was consummate--
No era spans less time, or greater weight.
quantum leap
The particle is here, and then is there --
But never in between. How does it dare?
I also like the "Sf Clichés: A sonnet cycle" (there's a reason Lois McMaster Bujold is almost the limit of my interest in sci-fi, and that reason can be succinctly summed as "space feudalism!"):
Some people distinguish analogy from similarity; we consider it a subset of this trope. For "as one is to ten, so is ten to one hundred" is certainly based on similarity, and "a bad citizen is just like an enemy." Although these things often go too far, too, as for example: "if it is shameful for the mistress of the house to have intercourse with a slave, then it is shameful for the master to have intercourse with a slave girl."
The other thing I've been reading today (well, apart from 2.5 pages of a really tedious German article about the origins of "the garment of vanity" (lit: "the chiton of empty glory") (it's the last piece of clothing/passions philosophers remove, in case you were wondering)) is a book of short stories and poetry of John M. Ford: he likes his sci-fi/modernized antiquity, and I do too! The poetry I am not so into, with a few exceptions. The couplets about various topics in physics are very nice. An excerpt:
open/oscillating universe
So will it stop, or not? The answer tells
Much less about the stars than of ourselves.
Planck epoch
One flash when gravity was consummate--
No era spans less time, or greater weight.
quantum leap
The particle is here, and then is there --
But never in between. How does it dare?
I also like the "Sf Clichés: A sonnet cycle" (there's a reason Lois McMaster Bujold is almost the limit of my interest in sci-fi, and that reason can be succinctly summed as "space feudalism!"):
1: Galactic Empires
One would not think that Empire could survive
As starships Roman cavalry displace;
The politics of Space must needs derive
From Einstein's time, Planck's heat and Riemann's space.
Yet "history repeats," some (heedless) say,
Analogies persist, however crude,
And democratic notions all give way
To fealty and service, fief and feud.
The Empire will not die, as mortals must,
The purple of their robes is colorfast;
Their golden age untouched by moth or rust,
And liberties, it seems cannot outlast
The paper image of a narrow Rome
Bestrode by cardboard Caesars dressed in chrome.
