Just to follow up a bit on my interest in Auerbach. Yes, Mimesis spoke to me from my bookshelves as I was thinking about how to compose a review of a book about people reflecting on the experience of working in a liminal zone defined by competing world views. Taking the book in hand and rereading the famous first chapter recalled the sense of wonder with which I still encounter authors with big ideas that seem to make sense of at least some aspects of long stretches of history, coupled with a certain awe toward scholars like Auerbach, who could not only read several languages but apparently knew them well enough to make stylistic assessments of texts written in them. It is hard to imagine anyone being able to publish a book these days in which long stretches of Latin, translations of the Latin, and comments on style referring to the Latin instead of the English translation appear. Then, pausing to savor that moment, I sense other connections coming alive in my brain. One string of associations leads from Auerbach to Ruth Benedict, who borrowed from Nietzsche the distinction between Appollonian and Dyonysian strands in ancient Greek culture, another famous contrast in which the opposition of order and clarity to chaos and ambiguity looms large. That reminds me of Andrew Abbott's Chaos of Disciplines, in which, according to the University of Chicago Press website, Abbott "... presents a fresh and daring analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. *Chaos of Disciplines* reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles. New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts. *"Chaos of Disciplines uses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines, and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences. Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method, then, in fields ranging from history, sociology, and literature, are to the contrary, radically similar; much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own distinctions."* Then, another book on my shelves speaks to me, N.J. Girardot's Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism, where Girardot talks about "the overwhelming cultural compulsion to distinguish cosmos and chaos respectively in terms of absolute order and disorder, meaning and nonsense" and then goes on to elaborate, "In many archaic traditions this kind of dichotomy is apparently sanctioned by the mythical imagery of a primordial battle between the forces of chaotic disorder and the triumphant powers of the sacred order of the cosmos. The mythic chaos, however, is never just equivalent to nothingness, profanity, neutrality, unreality, nonbeing, death, or absolute disorder. Despite the fact that chaos constantly threatens the cosmic order, frequently becoming synonymous with the demonic, a comparative assessment of creation mythology generally affirms that the cosmos originally came from, and continually depends on, the chaos of the creation time." Now there unfolds in my imagination a string of fractal oppositions: cosmos and chaos, Greek and Hebrew literature as Auerbach describes them, Appollonian versus Dyonysian, first in Nietschze's discussion of the birth of the tragedy, then in Benedict's Patterns of Culture. This may, of course, be nothing more than a bit of intellectual bricolage, the Savage Mind in operation as Levi-Strauss describes it. Still, there is that sense of wonder aroused by things appearing to click together. What fun. John -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN Tel. +81-45-314-9324 http://www.wordworks.jp/