3 June

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres reminded us that a legend is also the name given to something at the bottom of a map that allows you to read it. For Serres, legends in history do the same thing, they allow you to read society and life in profound ways. Take angels. In religious legends, angels are God's messengers. They're everywhere, huge in number. Serres saw the legend of angels as the key to understanding the modern world - the world of communications. Everything is a message, and in fact even what we call the natural world is full of messages too, if you know how to read them. The wind is a message, it literally tells you about diverse conditions globally, from your own backyard. But we mostly can't hear or understand those messages. The world is alive, and we're deaf to it.