Bridge from [Pi] to [Curious]

COLORS/FAITH/BELIEFS/NUMBERS -- LIFE OF PI *VS* CURIOUS INCIDENT

Colors:
Orange = Hindu,
Green = Islam,
White = Christianity

"The vestibule had clean, white walls; the table and benches were of dark wood; and the priest was dressed in a white cassock -- it was all neat, plain, simple. I was filled with a sense of peace. But more than the setting, what arrested me was my intuitive understanding that he was there -- open, patient -- in case someone, anyone, should want to talk to him; a problem of the soul, a heaviness of the heart, a darkness of the conscience, he would listen with love. He was a man whose profession it was to love, and he would offer comfort and guidance to the best of his ability" (Pi, 52)

Yellow BAD: custard, bananas, double yellow lines, yellow fever, yellow flowers, sweet corn
Brown BAD: dirt, gravy, poo, wood, Melissa Brown (Curious, 84)
Red GOOD

Faith/Religion/Beliefs

"Reason, that fool's gold for the bright" (Pi, 5) DISCUSS

"The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite" (Pi, 48-9).

"I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" -- and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story" (Pi, 64).

"I am to suffer hell without any account of heaven? In that case, what is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities -- the getting of food, clothing, and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?" (Pi, 98)


"If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?" (Pi, 297)

"Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater" (Pi, 298).

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality" (Pi, 302).

"What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now" (Curious, 33).

"People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they thing it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance... (Curious, 164)

"If everyone in the world was tossing coins eventually someone would get 5,698 heads in a row and they would think they were very special. But they wouldn't be because there would be millions of people who didn't get 5,698 heads... (Curious, 164)

"There is life on earth because of an accident. But it is a very special kind of accident" that requires replication, mutation, and heritability (Curious, 164-5).

"And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a disease" (Curious, 165).

Numbers

"In that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge" (Pi, 24) & "That's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go" (Pi, 285)

"I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them" (Curious, 12).

Beauty in the Everyday

"People go on holidays to see new things and relax, but...you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles....A thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new" (Curious, 178).

"Every morning before I was out the main gate I had one last impression that was both ordinary and unforgettable: a pyramid of turtles; the iridescent snout of a mandrill; the stately silence of a giraffe; the obese, yellow open mouth of a hippo; the beak-and-claw climbing of a macaw parrot up a wire fence; the greeting claps of a shoebill's bill; the senile, lecherous expression of a camel" (Pi, 14-5). FIND EXAMPLES IN YOUR OWN LIFE

 "You are as likely to see sea life from a ship as you are to see wildlife in a forest from a car on a highway" (Pi, 176). SLOW DOWN!

"I sang that tree's glory, its solid, unhurried purity, its slow beauty. Oh, that I could be like it, rooted to the ground but with my every hand raised up to God in praise!" (Pi, 260)


Time

 "If you don't have a timetable time is not there....because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep, and it is like west or nor-nor-east, which won't exist when the earth stops existing and falls into the sun because it is only a relationship between the North Pole and the South Pole and everywhere else" (Curious, 156-7).

"If you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing" (Curious, 158) CONSIDER THE INTANGIBILITY OF TIME (MADE MANIFEST IN WATCHES, SUNDIALS -- HUMANITY ACHES TO CAPTURE IT/CHAIN IT TO THE EARTH)