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direct access to understanding. I have only to open a book to roam effortlessly in the world designed for me by Proust and others like him. The other route takes me through a frustrating labyrinth, with unending new vistas such as fascinate the reader in the library of Babel. Indeed, the first way is through a book, the second through a library of libraries. I still have to decide whether there is any connection between Book and books, and vice-versa. But, while I was dreaming my way through so many questions and texts, thinking the thread was hopelessly lost, I came to realize that, even though my quest had produced no result of the sort I wanted, something had happened: Time had passed and, in the end, I was not quite the same as I thought I was at the beginning (once again, having read Proust, I should have known). True, for the most part my efforts had been in vain, but not totally: I have become a different man, both a little wiser and with a better overall knowledge of a very small slice of the past. I know that the Unknown keeps growing faster than the grasp I try to gain on it, but the pleasure I find in assembling ever-smaller bits and pieces of whats left of the 19th century is getting stronger every day. I used to be a specialist; I am now an amateur, that is, someone who accepts with bittersweet relief the fact that to most questions he can confidently reply: I dont know. Universit de Montral

Michel Serres:

I. Bryce-Hell
First the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but: wind, rain, ice, hail, and finally drought under an intense sun, eroding the red rock of the canyon over the course of long eras. Different in duration here and there, the most resistant of it remainshence these thousands of aligned, vertical needles. End of the visit, lets get in the car and head out to go to bed. Too bad for the truth, flat and stupid. An Indian legend recounts it differently: in ancient times a population lived there, in the valley. Filled with hatred and vengeance, haunted by suspicion and resentment, it was so violent that God decided to punish it. He turned it into statues, petrified in its own blood and that of its enemies. It is thus that I see Bryce Canyon for the first time. Impossible not to see those legions of the damned. Upright, close together, compressed and
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compiled in rows and columns, by squadrons, brigades and divisions, legions and army corpsproud, heads high, distinct and helmeted, chests thrust out, confined in their uniforms, legs stiff beneath their gaiters, immobile, on the look-out, their weapons resting against their feet, ready to do battle. All gather in a mass as though on parade beneath the fortified castle that dominates, behind them, and from which the general will appear to hurl them into the furnace: Agamemnon and his Greek kinglets, Ajax and Achilles, to destroy and burn Troy; Darius, to hurl his mob of Persians to assault Thermopylae; Alexander and his generals commanding the Macedonians to devastate India; Caesar and his centurions to massacre Gaul till nothing is left; Attila and his Huns with their scorched-earth policy; Napoleon and his marshalls to bury the Great Army beneath the snow; White Power to assassinate the Indians and enslave the Bantus, the Maoris, the Dravidians Blucher, Hindenburg, Foch and Joffre, Rommel and Patton Truman to incinerate Hiroshima, and the atomic scientists to increase the destructive power of bombs ... All the chief butchers of the ancient and recent abominations of human history ... and their sons, sacrificed by the millionsartillerymen, foot soldiers, grenadiersall finally petrified, covered and soaked through with coagulated blood for all eternity. Never having seen Bryce, Dante did not know how to describe Hell.

II. Fontenelle, Troubadour of Knowledge1

I love Fontenelle because he incarnates an ideal of knowledge that today is rejected. In the nine volumes of his Oeuvres that I have just edited, I found the old alliance between the culture of science and the humanitiesa vital synthesis in all our authors since the 16th century until quite recently. Todays university, grown partial and no doubt stupid, no longer gives one the right nor the possibility to write a book on the theatre of Pierre Corneille (one of Fontenelles uncles) and another on infinitesimal calculus, or to ponder the origin of myths and to participate in an expert and inventive way in the debate between Cartesian vortexes and Newtonian mechanics (a debate I consider still open, since todays physics has not yet said the last word on turbulence). It no longer gives the right to pen a preface to Monsieur de lHpital et son calcul de lInfini and to critique Malebranches occasional causes; to write for the theater and the opera, on the one hand, but also to write Eloges of scientists. Like so many others of our language, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, a member of both the Acadmie Franaise and the Acadmie
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des Sciences, thinks and invents without making a distinction, as we unfortunately do, between culture strictly limited by an ignorance of the sciences, and science limited by its lack of culture. In Fontenelle there is a marriage between subtlety and geometry. Although we are descendents of this union, we reject its lesson. Thus I love Fontenelles first volume, Dialogue des Morts, which imitates Lucian. Not long ago it had seemed to me important to re-write Lucian for a better comprehension of the history of science and its recent avatars. In Fontenelles second volume, I am delighted with the emergence of the new discipline of exobiology, in his Entretien sur la pluralit des mondes. His correspondence with Leibniz, another Troubadour of Knowledge, dazzles me in the third volume: La Gomtrie de linfini in fact culminates in the differential analysis that defines the delicate contacts between straight lines and curves. In the case of a punctual meeting, Fontenelle calls the straight line not the tangent, but the touchante, and if the meeting takes place in two points in continuing proximity, he calls it la baisante, in keeping with the usage of the time. Echoes of Couperin, one might say. All the more so, since between these two caresses, a decisive question was being raised at the time, on the infinitely small, still asked today: does it exist? This is a nice use of ontology: a Boucher-like gentleness can result in touching one another in non-existent zones. The fact that these Oeuvres finish, in Volume 9, with an outline of the Dictionnaire des Sciences et des Arts, the fruit of a collaboration with Thomas Corneille, his other uncle, charms me. Diderot and dAlembert would later form a couple that would mimic this one. Thus the encyclopedic trend of the Enlightenment can be found already in Fontenelle. But what strikes me is not so much the theater and operas of Volumes 4 and 5 (mediocre, at best) but the Eloges of Volume 6, where the historian of science draws unceasingly not only upon the thought of Newton and Leibniz on the occasion of the debate over the invention of differential calculus, but upon the astronomer Cassini and the geometrist Viviani. (Who does not know the ovals of the former as well as the window of the latterintersection of a cylinder and a sphere?) Fontenelle draws upon Ozanamtheologian, algebraist and physician, upon Varignon, an ecclesiastic first and an expert in mechanics second; upon Rolle, of whose work, unfortunately, there only remains the famous theorem on real roots. And finally, he draws upon the physician Chirac, the famous ChiracPierre, born at Conques in the Rouergues region. Recently my friend Leprince-Ringuet, a physician as well as a writer, attempted unsuccessfully to equal Fontenelles record of longevity at the Acadmie Franaise. While ill, he wrote me notes filled with wit and with
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this hope. Fontenelle lived to be 100, as we knowa feat in an era when life expectancy did not exceed 35 years. From Rouen, where he was born, he and the Corneilles observed, in two generations, the passage from the Fronde to the precursors of the Revolution. But this story, involving only cadavers, has little interest compared to the story that says Fontenelle loved marquises. It so happened that he taught themah, the Troubadour of Knowledge!the rudiments of algebra and astronomy, in some garden, at night, before attacking the second chapter, devoted to the courts of love. This second part of the lesson, given gratis beneath the stars, brought him glory. Its said that in the last decade of his life he forgot the elements of courtesy he had practiced during his lifetime. Thus one day he failed to knock before entering the chamber of one of these young marquises, and pushing open the door, found her in the delicious attire of Eve, so much appreciated by specialists. Far from offering embarrassed excuses, the centenarian considered her at great length, dazzled, and lifting his arms to the heavens, exclaimed, Ah! Madame, if only I were 10 years younger! Paris translated by Roxanne Lapidus Notes
1. Troubadour of Knowledge is the translation supplied by William Paulson and Sheila Faria Glaser for Serress concept of Le Tiers Instruit. See Serress The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Charles J. Stivale:
Every time I feel fascination I just cant stand still, Ive got to use her Every time I think of what you pulled me through, dear Fascination moves sweeping near me David Bowie

What are the questions that fascinate you? This question raises the very question of questioning itself and of the relation of fascination to knowledge, to the creation of knowledge, and to the material conditions of its creation. Two sorts of questioning, both practical and speculative, grip me and pull me through. Some practical questions are: What can I do as a teacher for my students? What new tools are available to renew teaching and learning experiences? How do I and we negotiate the
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