Reviews for Functional differential equations

The average rating for Functional differential equations based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-20 00:00:00 Joseph Palombi Just what is the point of stories? Why do we let them take up such a large part of our lives? How is it that we never seem to grow out of them? We are all likely to meet people who will tell us that, in fact, they do not really like stories at all. I've found this is often the reason people give for not reading - they are not interested in stories. But, almost invariably, these same people will watch detective shows on television or Doctor Who or Star Trek or any one of thousands of other television shows based on 'stories'. Stories are harder to eschew than we might like to think. But what is the attraction? In the first essay in this remarkably short collection of wonderfully insightful essays, the author proposes: "These four functions of myth and folklore should establish the listening to and learning of the old tales as being among the most basic elements of our education: creating a landscape of allusion, enabling us to understand our own and other cultures from inside out, providing an adaptable tool of therapy, and stating in symbolic and metaphoric terms the abstract truths of our common human existence." So, let's take those one at a time. Years ago my youngest daughter was reading some poem for high school. We started talking about it and I did that thing that I guess people who spend too much time reading sometimes do - I started telling her about how the poem referred to Dante's Inferno and to the Bible and whatever else I noticed along the way. She stopped me and said, 'Do I need to know every poem ever written before I can understand any single poem?' Now, if you have been wondering why you might bother having kids, that's as good a reason as I can come up with. Of course the answer is no, well, no-ish. It isn't that poetry is merely a huge game of 'spot that reference' - but that the more allusions we are able to pick, the more a story or a poem might mean. It is like being able to flick on more and more switches and turn on more lights - you are looking at the same thing as before, but now there are less shadows, or, perhaps more accurately, different shadows. (One of the nicest quotes in this book - which of course I can't find now - is that one can never light a candle without throwing shadows). Stories allow us to separate ourselves from our world. Bernstein refers to this as giving us a universal perspective, but in that way that everything ends up a crazy contradiction of opposites, such a universal view also helps us to both see ourselves anew while also diminishing ourselves. So far as I can place myself in the shoes of someone else, just so far am I not standing in my own shoes. Stories do put us in another people's shoes. But sometimes (as she so beautifully explains in duscussing Puss in Boots and Rumplestiltskin) the underlying story is of hatred for the other, it distances us rather than bringing us closer. I had never thought of Rumplestiltskin as being a story of loathed Jewish moneylenders or Puss in Boots as being about ethnic cleansing, but it will be hard not to think of that now. I would probably run the last two functions of myth together. I would probably go as far as to say that all therapy is a species of understanding of the abstract metaphors we share of our common existence. That's about as Jungian as I get, but then, I guess that's about as Jungian as anyone would ever need to get. These stories and myths have lasted as long as they have because they have endlessly fascinating things to tell us about our selves. She makes the wonderful point that we are not social animals so much as societal animals. It isn't that we like to hang around together all that much that makes us human (god, the blessing of some peace and quiet away from people sometimes) - it is more that without a society (and that means a language community as much as anything else) we just don't get to be human. Often the stories we tell - stories that seem dark and frightening and poignant beyond our ability to listen anymore - are actually our only protection against the awful truth of existence, our only means of understanding our lives. Her point about Disney's cutesy versions of much darker tales is that they take away from us more than just the horror of the originals, but also their potential to help us grasp truths about our shared existence - Cinderella, for example, is transformed by Disney into a hapless, dumb and utterly dependent girl (even relying on mice, for god's sake), but this takes away the underlying message of the original story that 'god helps those who help themselves'. I was once told that we tell children folk tales so that they understand they are not freaks when they have nightmares. That it is not them, so that fairytales help us to justify our nightmares to ourselves. Both the nightmares we dream and the nightmares we live through. How ironic then that our obsession with 'protecting' children from the horrors of these stories might well be doing them more harm. Now, I have told just about everyone I know this over the last two days. Sometimes there are things I learn that really make me wonder how it is possible I could have gotten to the age I am (I mean, nearly 50) and yet have never known before. If you don't already know this, this is going to take your breath away. One of the things you are most likely to know about Cinderella is how the Prince recognises her. He has kept her glass slipper and he has been going around town getting everyone to put their feet into it, but they all have feet that are just too big. That it has become a glass slipper is due to a mistranslation - the French words for glass and feathered are quite similar. But the interesting thing here is the country this story originated in which explains Cinderella's tiny feet - China! Now, isn't that obvious when it is pointed out - but without having all of the bits put before me I would never have guessed on my own. I love finding out things like that - obvious in hindsight, it is one of my favourite things. All that remains is to thank Abigail for recommending this one to me - wonderful stuff. It has inspired me to read some of the books in the further reading section at the back of the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-03 00:00:00 Jill Winter Every few years I take this book out and reread it. Yolen writes with deceptive simplicity and clarity that one doesn't realize how profoundly true her words are until they keep coming back in memory. From this book comes a (deservedly) repeated quotation, which I reproduce here, as I use it frequently to give the short answer why I can't read game of Thrones, well-written as it is: And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth." And: "Touch magic. Pass it on."