cardinal points

The ever-astounding and thought-piquing Brain Pickings reviews a new book in its weekly digest on man's eternal quest to conceptualise and map the cosmos that surrounds us and our place in it. Michael Benson's Cosmigraphics spans four millennia of merciful struggle to understand the universe through inspired expression grounded in myth, religious, scientific and elegant aesthetic principles through a selection of seminal works that reflect the thinking of the age. Benson's book's title is an allusion to modern Italian story-teller Italo Calvino's collection Cosmicomics and the lament that absent reference and orientation, even one's own little nook of the galaxy could be plotted away to nowhere at all.