Cleavage Term
Snow is mainly remembered as the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
According to Orrin Judd, we can now see “how profoundly wrong Snow was in everything except for his initial metaphor, of a divide between science and the rest of the culture.”
For more on that metaphor, see the previous entry, “The Line.”
I prefer a lesser-known work of Snow– his long biographical foreword to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. The foreword, like the book itself, is an example of what Robert M. Pirsig calls “Quality.” It begins with these words:
“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest.”
Related material:
“The Sail of Ulysses,”
Canto V
Wallace Stevens,
“The Sail of Ulysses,”
Canto V