That caricature of Philosophy must be partly to blame: the "man of reason" pictured as a serious, high-minded Dumbledore.
In the end, we get from Egan an analytical, reasoned picture of Commoner clearly a seminal figure in the history of American environmentalism and of his role in that environmentalism.
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, writes: 'When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture... reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions' [ 16].
For some reason, this picture intrigues our hero more than the other, more fantastic ones.
As usual, he stood up nicely, his arms close to his body and his feet not too far apart, ready to go anywhere but not without a reason — the picture of a powerful, decisive intellect unfettered by preconceptions.
For some reason, I picture him spluttering those words through gales of laughter, with one arm hooked around the shoulders of a bemused refugee and the latest issue of Variety folded open on his lap.
For some reason I picture potential buyers of the Original Bookworks' new Off-White Vellum range (from £80 per metre, 01285 659718 for stockists), as having cream carpets, or one of those gorgeous loft spaces beloved of interiors mags, where all the walls, floors and furniture have been painted in artfully scuffed white.
"The reader will learn too, not the rote lessons of stray disconnected facts that so many fishing books try to teach you," he wrote, "how to read the stream, select a fly, how to cast, how to hook and land a fish -- but instead an exercise in environmental reason, a picture of the world in which all those lessons fit together naturally".
For composition with multiple subjects, which is really the only reason a picture should be taken with a Lytro camera and not a traditional one, you need as wide an angle as possible.
For some reason that picture haunts me, it has some kind of absurdity to it that I like.
