A Certain World. A Commonplace Book

nomina si pereunt, perit et cognitio rerum [Without names, our knowledge of things would perish] (1)Carl LinnaeusProper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable (2). W. H. AudenThis year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus (1707-1778) whose binomial system has made it unlikely that the names of living things will perish. We also celebrate the 100th anniversary of Wystan Hugh Auden who gave his time the proper name: The Age of Anxiety (3). An avatar of the 18th century Enlightenment, Linnaeus set the stage for Darwin by recognizing similarities between man and ape: he named our species Homo sapiens. In an age when the word was unspoken, Linnaeus recognized that even plants had sex. He put Sweden on the map of natural science and changed forever the way we label living things.An avatar of the Enlightened Left in the 20th century, Auden brought English poetry into the modern world: he set planes and trains and automobiles to verse. At a time when "In the nightmare of

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A Certain World. A Commonplace Book

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Beethoven and Einthoven—More Than a Rhyme

Beethoven and Einthoven—More Than a Rhyme

A time of Foolishness . . .

Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden

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