{"id":188,"date":"2005-05-24T08:48:43","date_gmt":"2005-05-24T12:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=188"},"modified":"2005-05-24T08:48:43","modified_gmt":"2005-05-24T12:48:43","slug":"katascopos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/katascopos\/","title":{"rendered":"Katascopos"},"content":{"rendered":"

saint-exThanks to Robert McFarlane, who taught me a new word today: katascopos. The lesson emerged from his recent Guardian<\/em> article<\/a> on Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an author I admire (and was just discussing with my colleague Dan Hubbard–synchronicity indeed):<\/p>\n

\nIn Saint-Ex’s writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. “A person taking off from the ground,” he once remarked, “elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding.” The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos – a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer – and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose – terse, epigrammatic, visionary – is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love the sound of “salutary aerial view.” Perhaps if I say the words over and over again, I will keep alive the possibility of becoming a katascopos, of preserving what Milton calls the “empyreall conceit” (heavenly or cosmic imagination).<\/p>\n

From Saint-Exupery’s The Wisdom of the Sands<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nIf you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.<\/p>\n

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saint-Ex, Milton, beg from above \/ A pattern of your vision!<\/p>\n

Thanks to ALDaily<\/a> for the Guardian<\/em> link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Robert McFarlane, who taught me a new word today: katascopos. The lesson emerged from his recent Guardian article on Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an author I admire (and was just discussing with my colleague Dan Hubbard–synchronicity indeed): In Saint-Ex’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-32","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}