“If a book does not please me, I can lay it aside, just as I can pass by pictures or statues that are not to my taste, and in that case the author always has available more or less the excuse that his book was not written for every Tom, Dick, or Harry.”

In “Survival of the Smallest” {NYR, March 10], István Deák writes on page 22: “In ancient Egypt, dwarfs were often venerated like gods.” Deák here is discussing pathological dwarfs. However, Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1938, Vol. 1, pp. 5–11), argues persuasively that the “god-dancers” venerated by the ancient Egyptians were not pathological dwarfs at all, but pygmies from the African rain forest. Schebesta cites, inter alia, a letter of the pharaoh Pepi II or Phiops II (Sixth Dynasty) which seems clearly to support this view.

Theodore John Kaczynski
Florence, Colorado

1. I saw The Road last night (good, depressing post-apocalyptic film) and was googling Cormac McCarthy today, and came across an interview with him done by the Wall Street Journal. He relates an anecdote about the physicist Paul Dirac who, in response to Richard Feynman’s revision of quantum electrodynamics, declared it too ugly to be true, despite its logicalness; turns out Dirac was wrong. Also turns out that this is a perfect example to help me illustrate a point I made in a paper I wrote a few years ago about Hilary Putnam, basically agreeing that a certain amount of imaginative identification with a discourse and its evaluative stances was essential to doing science (i.e. being able to appreciate the beauty of a theorem or hypothesis), but disagreeing that this constituted objectivity in any sense beyond what intersubjectivity, and that a standard such as “beautiful” did not stand on its own, and was to some degree derivative of other criteria.

2. I stumbled across an old notebook in which I had written some quotations from a book by C.S. Lewis (probably The Abolition of Man) which will be perfect for an essay I’m currently writing on the late British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and creativity. Not so much an argument, as a turn of phrase—something of which Lewis was a master.

Update: LibraryThing is back online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For actual justice to be done, of course, much more is demanded. In “Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration,” in the December 2008 issue of Harper’s, Scott Horton argues persuasively for an official, commission-led inquest into the Bush administration’s role in sanctioning and promoting torture, in contravention of both international and domestic statutes.

It will take the world a long time to recover from the damage done by Bush et al., confirming in a sad sort of way Margaret Mead’s words:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

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