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From miniature lives to the secrets of maths, Ziya Tong shares books to widen our worldview
They say there’s a German word for everything. My favourite is Lebenswelt, an idea described by the Austrian philosopher Alfred Schütz as “that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted as common sense”. Probing beyond this is the hard work of authors: they remove our blinkers, while revealing deeper layers of reality. That is, they teach us how to see, instead of merely look.
Take a simple patch of dirt. Most of us wouldn’t look twice. But David Haskell spent a year nose-deep in leaf litter examining a single square metre of old-growth forest in Tennessee. In The Forest Unseen he documents the marvellous profusion of life, and all the miniature commuters – from snails and salamanders to coyote pups and woodpeckers – that cross this small parcel of land, or call it their home. The result is an almost magical look at the interconnectedness of the natural world, and the invisible ties that bind us together. Continue reading...