None dare call it absurd …

… Roger’s Rules — What Philistinism Looks Like. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

W.H. Auden did not have the honor of helping to discover DNA, but when it comes to the reality of human experience, he is a much sounder guide than Francis Crick. “We seem to have reached a point,” Auden wrote in Secondary Worlds, 

where if the word “real” can be used at all, then the only world which is “real” for us, as in the world in which all of us, including scientists, are born, work, love, hate and die, is the primary phenomenal world as it is and always has been presented to us through our senses, a world in which the sun moves across the sky from east to west, the stars are hung like lamps in the vault of heaven, the measure of magnitude is the human body and objects are either in motion or at rest.

We know of no appearance — not even a mirage — that is not some degree real, nor anything real that does not in some way appear to be.