Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
If you recently subscribed to Brain Food, you may recall receiving the welcome email that includes Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus, drowning, yet barely visible in the background of the scene, is there to remind us all of our unimportance in the grand scheme of things.
Part of the joys of being exposed to something new is that it reveals the interconnectivity of things. After all, though overly simplified, the way our brains work is by making connections. One thing literally leads to another.
When he visited the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, British poet W. H. Auden was inspired to write a poem on the work of the Dutch masters, and how they carefully captured the banality of our lives, reminding us that we are far from being at the centre of any universe.
Museé des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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