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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
The Intellectual
Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete
Your Education, and Roam Confidently with
the Cultural Class
by David S. Kidder & Noah D.
Oppenheim
Rodale Books - October
2006
The
Intellectual Devotional
Week 1
By David Kidder and Noah
Oppenheim
Daily Devotionals have long been a
favored tool of those looking for a
regular dose of spiritual growth. Bedside
volumes, read upon waking in the morning
or before retiring at night, Devotionals
consist of 365 exercises in learning and
reflection. One easily digestible entry is
tackled each day.
The Intellectual Devotional is a
secular compendium in the same tradition.
It is one year's worth of daily readings
that will refresh your spirit, stimulate
your mind, and help complete your
education. Each entry is drawn from a
different field of knowledge: History,
Literature, Visual Arts, Science, Music,
Philosophy, and Religion. Read one passage
a day and you will explore each subject
once a week.
These readings offer the kind of
regular exercise the brain requires to
stay fresh, especially as we age. They
represent an escape from the day-to-day
grind into the rarefied realm of human
wisdom. And, they will open new horizons
of intellectual discovery.
A brief summary of the journey ahead .
. .
Monday -- History
A survey of people and events that
shaped the development of Western
civilization.
Tuesday -- Literature
A look at great writers and a synopsis
of their most important works -- poems and
novels that continue to inspire readers
today.
Wednesday -- Visual Arts
An introduction to the artists and
artistic movements that yielded the
world's most influential paintings,
sculptures, and works of architecture.
Thursday -- Science
From the origin of black holes to a
description of how batteries work, the
wonders of science are simplified and
revealed.
Friday -- Music
What inspired our greatest composers,
how to read a sheet of notes, and why
Mozart is so revered -- a comprehensive
review of our musical heritage.
Saturday -- Philosophy
From ancient Greece to the twentieth
century, the efforts of mankind's greatest
thinkers to explain the meaning of life
and the universe.
Sunday -- Religion
An overview of the world's major
religions and their beliefs.
We hope your progress through this
collection of knowledge inspires your
curiosity and opens new areas of
exploration in your life.
--David S. Kidder and Noah D.
Oppenheim
Week
1
History
Monday, Day 1
The
Alphabet
In circa 2000 BC, the Egyptian pharaohs
realized they had a problem. With each
military victory over their neighbors,
they captured and enslaved more prisoners
of war. But the Egyptians could not pass
down written orders to these slaves as
they could not read hieroglyphics.
Early writing systems, such as Egyptian
hieroglyphics, were extremely cumbersome
and difficult to learn. These systems had
thousands of characters, with each symbol
representing an idea or word. Memorizing
them could take years. Only a handful of
Egyptians could actually read and write
their complicated script.
Linguists believe that almost all
modern alphabets are derived from the
simplified version of hieroglyphics
devised by the Egyptians four thousand
years ago to communicate with their
slaves. The development of an alphabet,
the writing system used throughout the
Western world, changed the way the
ancients communicated.
In the simplified version, each
character represented only a sound. This
innovation cut back the number of
characters from a few thousand to a few
dozen, making it far easier to learn and
use the characters. The complicated
hieroglyphic language was eventually
forgotten, and scholars were not able to
translate the characters until the
discovery of the Rosetta stone in
1799.
The alphabet was extremely successful.
When the Egyptian slaves eventually
migrated back to their home countries,
they took the writing system with them.
The alphabet spread across the Near East,
becoming the foundation for many writing
systems in the area, including Hebrew and
Arabic. The Phoenicians, an ancient
civilization of seaborne traders, spread
the alphabet to the tribes they
encountered along the Mediterranean coast.
The Greek and Roman alphabets, in turn,
were based on the ancient Phoenician
script. Today most Western languages,
including English, use the Roman
alphabet.
Additional Facts
1. Several letters in modern-day
English are direct descendents of ancient
Egyptian characters. For instance, the
letter B derives from the Egyptian
character for the word house.
2. The most recent edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476
words in current usage, among the most of
any language.
Literature
Tuesday, Day 2
Ulysses
James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is
widely regarded as the greatest novel
written in English in the twentieth
century. It retells Homer's Odyssey
in the context of a single day -- June 16,
1904 -- in Dublin, Ireland, recasting
Homer's great hero Odysseus in the
unlikely guise of Leopold Bloom, an aging,
cuckolded ad salesman who spends the day
running errands and making various
business appointments before he returns
home at long last.
Though Bloom seems unassuming and
ordinary, he emerges as a heroic figure,
displaying compassion, forgiveness, and
generosity toward virtually everyone in
the odd cast of characters he meets. In
his mundane and often unnoticed deeds, he
practices an everyday heroism that is
perhaps the only heroism possible in the
modern world. And despite the fact that he
always feels like an outsider -- he is a
Jew in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland --
Bloom remains optimistic and dismisses his
insecurities.
Ulysses is celebrated for its
incredibly rich portraits of characters,
its mind-boggling array of allusions to
other literary and cultural works, and its
many innovations with language. Throughout
the course of the novel, Joyce flirts with
literary genres and forms ranging from
drama to advertising copy to Old English.
The novel is perhaps most famous for its
extensive use of stream-of-consciousness
narrative -- Joyce's attempt to render the
inner thoughts of his characters exactly
as they occur, with no effort to impose
order or organization. This technique
became a hallmark of modernist literature
and influenced countless other writers,
such as Virginia Woolf and William
Faulkner, who also experimented with it in
their works.
Not surprisingly, Ulysses poses
a difficult journey for the reader,
especially its famous last chapter, which
recounts the thoughts of Bloom's wife,
Molly. Molly's reverie goes on for more
than 24,000 words yet is divided into only
eight mammoth sentences. Despite the
challenge it poses, the chapter shows
Joyce at his most lyrical, especially in
the final lines, which reaffirm Molly's
love for her husband despite her
infidelity:
- and then he asked me would I yes
to say yes my mountain flower and first
I put my arms around him yes and drew
him down to me so he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart
was going like mad and yes I said yes I
will Yes.
Additional Fact
1. Ulysses was banned for obscenity
in the United States for nearly twelve
years because of its (mostly indirect)
sexual imagery.
Visual Arts
Wednesday, Day 3
Lascaux Cave
Paintings
The cave paintings at Lascaux are among
the earliest known works of art. They were
discovered in 1940 near the village of
Montignac in central France when four boys
stumbled into a cave. Inside they found a
series of rooms with nearly 1,500
paintings of animals that were between
15,000 and 17,000 years old.
There are several theories regarding
the function of the paintings. A natural
feature of the cave may have suggested the
shape of an animal to a prehistoric
observer who then added highlights to
relay his vision to others. Since many of
the paintings are located in inaccessible
parts of the cave, they may have been used
for magical practices. Possibly,
prehistoric people believed that the act
of drawing animals, especially with a high
degree of accuracy, would bring the beasts
under their control or increase their
numbers in times of scarcity.
The animals are outlined or portrayed
in silhouette. They are often shown in
what is called twisted perspective, that
is, with their heads in profile but their
horns facing front. Many of the images
include dots, linear patterns, and other
designs that may carry symbolic
meaning.
The most magnificent chamber of the
cave, known as the Great Hall of the
Bulls, contains a painted narrative. From
left to right, the pictures depict the
chase and capture of a bison herd.
As soon as the paintings had been
examined and identified as Paleolithic,
the caves were opened to the public in
1948. By 1955, however, it became
increasingly evident that exposure to as
many as 1,200 visitors per day was taking
its toll on the works inside. Although
protective measures were taken, the site
closed in 1963. In order to satisfy public
demand, a life-sized replica of the cave
was completed in 1983, only 200 meters
from the original.
Additional Facts
1. The cave painters were conscious
of visual perspective; they painted
figures high on the wall, styled so that
they would not appear distorted to the
viewer below.
2. The only human figure depicted in
the cave appears in the Shaft of the Dead
Man. The fact that it is drawn more
crudely than the animals suggest that they
did not think it was endowed with magical
properties.
Science
Thursday, Day 4
Cloning
In 1997, a baby sheep named Dolly
introduced the world to reproductive
cloning. She was a clone because she and
her mother shared the same nuclear DNA; in
other words, their cells carried the same
genetic material. They were like identical
twins reared generations apart.
Scientists at the Roslin Institute in
Scotland created Dolly by a process called
nuclear transfer. Taking the
genetic material from an adult donor cell,
they transferred it into an unfertilized
egg whose genetic material had been
removed. In Dolly's case, the donor cell
came from the mammary gland of a
six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe. The
researchers then gave the egg an electric
shock, and it began dividing into an
embryo.
One of the reasons Dolly's creation was
so astounding was that it proved to the
scientific community that a cell taken
from a specialized part of the body could
be used to create a whole new organism.
Before Dolly, almost all scientists
believed that once a cell became
specialized it could only produce other
specialized cells: A heart cell could only
make heart cells, and a liver cell could
only make liver cells. But Dolly was made
entirely from a cell extracted from her
mother's mammary gland, proving that
specialized cells could be completely
reprogrammed.
In many ways, Dolly was not like her
mother. For example, her telomeres were
too short. Telomeres are thin strands of
protein that cap off the ends of
chromosomes, the structures that carry
genes. Although no one is sure exactly
what telomeres do, they seem to help
protect and repair our cells. As we age,
our telomeres get shorter and shorter.
Dolly received her mother's six-year-old
telomeres, so from birth, Dolly's
telomeres were shorter than the average
lamb her age. Although Dolly appeared to
be mostly normal, she was put to sleep in
2004 at the age of six, after suffering
from lung cancer and crippling arthritis.
The average Finn Dorset sheep lives to age
eleven or twelve.
Additional Facts
1. Since 1997, cattle, mice, goats,
and pigs have been successfully cloned
using nuclear transfer.
2. The success rate for cloning is
very low in all species. Published studies
report that about 1 percent of
reconstructed embryos survive birth. But
since unsuccessful attempts largely go
unreported, the actual number might be
much lower.
3. Before she died, Dolly was the
mother of six lambs, all bred the
old-fashioned way.
4. A group of Korean researchers
claimed to have cloned a human embryo in
1998, but their experiment was terminated
at the 4-cell stage, so there was no
evidence of their success.
Music
Friday, Day 5
The
Basics
Music is organized sound that can be
replicated through imitation or notation.
Music is distinct from noise in that the
sounds of a door creaking open or
fingernails on a blackboard are irregular
and disorganized. The sound waves that map
these noises are complex and cannot be
heard as identifiable pitches.
Some of the basic ways that we analyze
musical sounds are:
Pitch: How high or how low a sound is
to the ear. Pitch is measured technically
by the frequency of a sound wave, or how
often waves repeat themselves. In western
music there are twelve unique pitches (C,
C-sharp or D-flat, D, D-sharp or E-flat,
E, F, F-sharp or G-flat, G, G-sharp or
A-flat, A, A-sharp or B-flat, and B). The
pitches followed by sharps or flats are
called accidentals, and they are most
easily described as the black keys on the
piano keyboard. They are located
musically, one half step between the two
pitches on either side of them. For
example, D-sharp and E-flat have the same
pitch. When referring to pitches in the
context of notated, or written music, they
are called notes.
Scale: A stepwise arrangement of
pitches (for example, C, D, E, F, G, A, B,
C) that often serves as the basis for a
melody. A piece, or a portion of a piece,
will often use only notes found in a
particular scale. Western music primarily
uses the major scale or the minor scale,
in one form or another. To most people,
the major scale, because of its particular
arrangement of pitches, has the quality of
sounding "bright," "happy," or "positive."
A minor scale, likewise, is usually
described as "dark," "sad," or
"pessimistic."
Key: An arrangement or system of
pitches, usually based on one of the major
or minor scales, that is meant to serve as
a reference point and a guiding force of a
melody. The tonic of a key is often the
starting and ending point for a piece
written in a particular key -- so if a
piece is in E major, then the pitch E will
serve as the piece's tonal center.
Additional Facts
1. All of these basic elements can
be notated on the staff, which is a
repeating of five parallel horizontal
lines. Often it is divided into measures
to indicate metric divisions in the piece
and marked at the beginning of each staff
of the page with a clef to indicate
reference points for identifying
pitches.
2. When a piece strays from its
basic key, this is called modulation. Keys
are indicated in written music by a key
signature at the beginning of each
staff.
3. There are hundreds of scales used
in the world's many different musical
cultures. In India, music played on the
sitar and other instruments chooses
pitches from a collection of twenty-two
possibilities, with the distances between
scale steps sometimes larger and sometimes
smaller than those used in Western music.
This can make differences between pitches
extremely subtle and demands a high
virtuosity from Indian classical
musicians.
Philosophy
Saturday, Day 6
Appearance and
Reality
Throughout its history, one of the
great themes of philosophy has been the
distinction between appearance and
reality. This distinction was central to
the thought of the earliest philosophers,
called the Presocratics, because
they lived before Socrates.
The Presocratics believed that the
ultimate nature of reality was vastly
different from the way it ordinarily
appeared to them. For instance, one
philosopher named Thales held that
appearances notwithstanding, all reality
was ultimately composed of water;
Heraclitus thought the world was built
from fire. Further, Heraclitus maintained
that everything was constantly in
motion. Another thinker, Parmenides,
insisted that nothing actually
moved and that all apparent motion was an
illusion.
The Presocratics took seriously the
possibility that all of reality was
ultimately made up of some more
fundamental substance. And they suspected
that uncritical, everyday observation
tends to present us with a misleading
picture of the world. For these reasons,
their thinking is often considered a
precursor to modern science as well as
philosophy.
Many later philosophers -- including
Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz -- followed in
this tradition and presented alternative
models of reality, which they claimed were
closer to the truth than ordinary,
commonsense views of the world.
Additional Facts
1. The distinction between
appearance and reality is also central to
the venerable philosophical tradition
known as skepticism.
2. Immanuel Kant also addressed the
difference between appearance and reality.
He distinguished between things we
experience and what he called a
"thing-in-itself."
Religion
Sunday, Day 7
Torah
The Torah is the name generally given
to the first five books of the Hebrew
Bible, or the Five Books of Moses.
Christians refer to these books as the Old
Testament. The word Torah can also
refer to the entire breadth of Jewish law
encompassing several texts as well as oral
traditions.
The Five Books of Moses are the basis
for the 613 laws that govern the Jewish
faith, and they are the foundation for the
world's three great monotheistic faiths --
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are
as follows:
Genesis: Tells the story of creation as
well as the history of the Israelites,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their
families
Exodus: Recounts the exodus from Egypt
to Canaan, including Moses receiving the
Ten Commandments
Leviticus: Contains the rules and
practices of worship
Numbers: Relates the journey of the
Israelites in the wilderness
Deuteronomy: Consists of speeches made
by Moses at the end of his life that
recount Israelite history and ethical
teachings
The five books are traditionally
believed to have been given to Moses on
Mount Sinai. Alternative theories claim
the beginning of the Torah was given on
Mount Sinai but that the revelation
continued throughout Moses's life.
Historically, archaeologists have
argued that the Torah was written sometime
between the tenth and sixth centuries BC.
Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis,
which according to Orthodox Jews is
heretical, claim that the original five
books came from four sources, eventually
compiled into one by a fifth author or
redactor. The arguments in favor of this
theory are the multiple names used for
God, varying styles of writing. and the
repetition of stories.
From the beginning, the Torah was
accompanied by an oral tradition, which
was necessary for its complete
understanding. Although it was thought to
be blasphemous to write the oral tradition
down, the necessity for doing so
eventually became apparent, leading to the
creation of the Mishna. Later, as rabbis
discussed and debated these two texts, the
Talmud was written in order to compile
their arguments.
The Jewish tradition uses the text of
the Torah to derive innumerable laws and
customs. Rabbinic scholars have spent
entire lifetimes parsing every word for
meaning.
Additional Facts
1. Torah scrolls written in Hebrew
by hand, contain 304,805 letters and may
take more than a year to produce by hand.
If a single mistake is made, the entire
scroll becomes invalid.
Reprinted
from: The Intellectual Devotional:
Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education,
and Roam Confidently with the Cultured
Class, by David S. Kidder & Noah
D. Oppenheim © 2006 TID Volumes, LLC.
Permission granted by Rodale, Inc.,
Emmaus, PA 18098.
David
S. Kidder is an entrepreneur with a wide
range of technology and marketing
experience. Kidder and his companies have
appeared in articles in the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA
Today, and other publications. He
lives in Westchester, New York, with his
wife, Johanna, their new baby, Jack, and
Bella, their charismatic dog.
Noah
D. Oppenheim, a producer of NBC's Today
show, has extensive experience in
television and print journalism. He has
produced and reported for Scarborough
Country and Hardball with Chris Matthews,
and his writing has appeared in
Esquire, the Wall Street
Journal, Men's Health, and the
Weekly Standard. He lives in New
York City with his wife,
Allison
For
more information, visit www.theintellectualdevotional.com
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