lft
June 4, 2019, 7:09pm
3
I don’t think there’s one correct procedure. This is a bit like asking a group of parents what is the best way to raise a child. You’ll get lots of contradictory answers, anecdotal evidence, and strong emotions. It can be interesting, even illuminating, but in the end you’ll just have to forge your own path.
That being said, I can’t resist sharing the Metaphor of the Rickety Bridge (from a book about translating poetry, among other things):
Imagine a deep, narrow chasm over which you would like to construct a strong, wide bridge. You take a long piece of rope and tie one end of it to a tree near the chasm’s edge. The other end you tie around a stone, and hurl the stone across the chasm. Now you make your way to the other side in a roundabout way and tie the far end of the rope to a tree on that side. In this stretch of anchored cord spanning the chasm you have the humble beginnings of a strong structure. It is, after all, an extremely primitive bridge. By swinging from your rope, you can cross more easily and quickly, and soon you have a second rope parallel to the first. Next, you can link the two parallel ropes together with some boards, and now you have something much more bridge-like. The stronger your tentative bridge, the more quickly you can cross over it and the more you can carry along with you. Eventually, you can start building a second bridge entirely out of wood alongside your first one, using the first one as a kind of scaffolding. In general, each stage will be a bit stronger than the previous one – but if by chance one should collapse, you always have the fallback position of what you had already done. Over time, and with a number of stages, you come to have the strong, wide bridge that was once only a dream.
– Douglas Hofstadter, “Le Ton beau de Marot”, p367.
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