I’ve made it clear that I think Edward Tufte is great, but I can’t help but smile at this comment on his use of T. S. Eliot: “There are many wonderful lines in Four Quartets and I simply glide over the heavy-handed religious material.”This could be a useful approach elsewhere: “There are many wonderful lines in the Aeneid and I simply glide over the heavy-handed founding-of-Rome material.” “There are many wonderful lines in Pride and Prejudice and I simply glide over the heavy-handed courtship-and-marriage material.”
Text Patterns
November 13, 2009
I think a lot of Unitarian churches take a similar approach to the Bible. (I say this as the son and grandson of Unitarian ministers.)
There are many pretty pictures in Tufte's books, and I simply glide over the heavy-handed material on presentation of data.
Yes, there's that great moment in one of Peter De Vries's books when a town is suffering from a flood and the local Unitarian-ish minister says, "May a kindly Providence deliver us from these acts of God!"