アップルのイメージ

Becoming Steve Jobsを図書館から借りて読み始めました。まあ、買うまでもないかなと思っていたからです。「銭湯とコーヒー牛乳」といった連想イメージを考えたこともあり、以下の部分に目がいきました。

アップルという名前を採用したところで、アップルで連想するイメージをいろいろと挙げているところです。聖書の例はすぐにイメージがつきましたが、Johnny Appleseedやapple pie、ウィリアム・テルなども取り上げていました。日本の林檎だと何が連想されるでしょうかね。Yutaは青森県くらいです。。。（汗）

Indeed, adopting the name Apple foreshadows the expansiveness and originality Steve would bring to the creation of these new machines. It’s suggestive of so much: the Garden of Eden, and the humanity—both good and bad—resulting from Eve’s bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Johnny Appleseed, the great sower of plentitude from American myth; the Beatles and their own record label, a connection that would lead to litigation years later; Isaac Newton, the plummeting apple, and the spark of an idea; American as apple pie; the legend of William Tell, who saved his own life and that of his son by using his crossbow to pierce an apple perched on the son’s head; wholesomeness, fecundity, and, of course, the natural world. Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies. It hints at a company that would bring, as it eventually did, humanism and creativity to the science and engineering of computers. As Clow suggests, settling on Apple was a great, intuitive decision. Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.

リンゴについて歴史やイメージについてまとめてくれている日本語のサイトがありました。リンゴという何気ない単語も日本人とアメリカ人ではイメージするものが違いそうです。NewtonやAppleseedはオックスフォードの学習辞典にのっていました。William Tellの見出語がないのはTellがスイス人だからでしょうか。ロングマンはTellも取り上げていてくれています。オックスフォードの方はNewtonの項目でhe discovered the idea of gravity (= the force that attracts things towards the centre of the planet) when he saw an apple fall from a tree in his garden.とリンゴのエピソードを書いてくれていますが、ロングマンにはありません。有名なエピソードなので入れてもらった方がありがたいですよね。

（オックスフォード）
Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) an English scientist. He is well known for discovering Newton's Laws, which explained the relationships between force, mass and movement. Many people know the story that he discovered the idea of gravity (= the force that attracts things towards the centre of the planet) when he saw an apple fall from a tree in his garden. He also discovered differential calculus, a branch of mathematics, at the same time as Leibniz discovered it in Germany, and made important discoveries about the nature of light and colour. He was made a knight in 1705.

Johnny Appleseed
(1774-1845) the popular name for John Chapman, an American who planted apple seeds for 40 years in the Ohio River valley. He began planting in 1806, and his work made him an American legend. He had long hair and travelled around in torn clothes and without shoes.

（ロングマン）
Tell, William
a Swiss folk hero of the 14th century, who opposed the Austrians who ruled Switzerland. According to a famous story, Tell was ordered by the Austrian governor to use his crossbow to shoot an apple placed on his own son's head. He succeeded in doing this because of his great skill, and later killed the governor. This encouraged the Swiss people to fight and gain their independence. Tell's story is told in a well-known opera by Rossini.

Newton, Sir Isaac
(1642-1727) a British physicist and mathematician who discovered gravity (=the force that causes things to fall towards the ground or to be pulled towards stars or planets in space). He made many other important scientific discoveries, and is one of the most important scientists who ever lived. Until the early 20th century, modern physics was based on Newton's work, and it is sometimes called Newtonian physics.



ついでながら、ペンギンが出しているDictionary of Symbolsのappleの見出語を引用しておきます。

Apple(-tree) The apple is employed symbolically in several senses which, however apparently distinct, are in fact interconnected. There are ‘The Apple of Discord’ awarded by Paris; ‘The Golden Apples’ from the Garden of the Hesperides, the fruit of immortality; the apple eaten by Adam and Eve, and the apple mentioned in the Song of Solomon, which, according to Origen, is the image of the richness, sweetness and saviour of the Word of God. In each case we have a key to knowledge, but one which is on the one hand fruit of the Tree of Life and on the other fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil of a unifying knowledge which grants immortality or of a disjunctive knowledge which initiates the Fall. In the language of alchemy, the ‘Golden Apple’ is a symbol of sulphur.

Wild crab-apples were gathered in ancient times, and full sized varieties were already found in Central Europe in the Neolithic era. In ancient myth the god of intoxication Dionysus was the creator of the apple, which he presented to Aphrodite, goddess of love. Erotic associations liken apples to woman’s breasts, and the core of an apple cut in halves to the vulva. In this way the apple acquired a somewhat ambiguous symbolism. the goddess Eris called for “the judgment of Paris” when she threw down a golden apple marked “for the most beautiful” (the “apple of discord” that in other languages corresponds to the English “bone of contention”); Helen of Troy was Paris’ reward for choosing Aphrodite, but his abduction of Helen led to the Trojan War. In Greece the apple was sacred to Venus as love and desire, a bridal symbol and offering. Apple branches are awarded as a prize in the Sun-bridegroom race as was the olive branch at the Moon-virgin race. The apple of Dionysos was the quince. Hercules had to brave great danger to retrieve the apples of the Hesperides from the far reaches of the west (compares to Islands of the Blessed). On the other hand, the earth-goddess Ge (or Gaea) gave Hera an apple as a symbol of fertility upon her engagement to Zeus. In Athens newlyweds divided and ate an apple when they entered the bridal chamber. Sending or tossing apples was a part of courtship. The Old Norse goddess Iduna guarded apples that brought eternal youth to whoever ate them.

The apple was the forbidden fruit of the Golden Age. As round it represents totality and unity, as opposed to the multiplicity of the pomegranate.

The Abbe E. Bertrand (quoted in The Masonic Symbol, Jules Boucher p. 235) states:
The symbolism of the apple is derived from its core, formed in the shape of a five-pointed star by the compartments which hold the pips….This why adepts have made it the fruit of knowledge and of freedom. Thus, the phrase ‘to eat the apple’ meant to them abuse of the intellect to gain knowledge of evil, abuse of the senses to lust after evil and abuse of freedom to commit evil. However, as is always the case, the mass of the uninitiated mistook the symbol for the reality. Furthermore, the inclusion within the meat of the apple of the Pentagram, the symbol of spiritual man, symbolizes the entanglement of the spirit in the flesh.

Robert Ambelain makes much the same observation in Dans l’ombre des cathedrales. ‘Contemporary adepts regard the apple as the icon of knowledge. Cut breadth wise it reveals a Pentagram, traditional symbol of knowledge, formed by the emplacement of its pips.’

In Celtic folklore, the apple is the fruit of knowledge, magic and prophecy. It also provides miraculous food. The woman from the Otherworld who comes in search of Condle, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, gives him an apple which provides him with food for a month and never grows less. Among the marvels which the god Lug set the three sons of Tuireann to find, in atonement for the murder of his father Cian, were three apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. Whoever ate of them would never again feel hunger or thirst, sorrow or sickness, nor would the apples grow less. In some Breton folk tales, eating an apple is the prelude to a prophecy (Ogam, Celtic Traditions 16: pp. 253-6). In the Celtic religion the apple was the symbol of knowledge handed down from ancestors. The Silver Bough had magic and chthonic powers the fruit of the Otherworld; fertility; marriage. Halloween, an apple festival, is associated with death of the old year. (apple bobbing, Saturn)

If the apple is a miraculous fruit, the apple tree itself (‘abellio’ in Celtic) is an Otherworld tree. It was a branch of an apple tree which the Otherworld woman who came in search of Bran gave to him before carrying him across the seas. The Isle of Avalon - Emain Ablach in Irish, Ynes Afallach in Welsh - also known as ‘the Orchard’, is the mythical resting place of dead kings and heroes. Here, according to Cornish tradition, King Arthur took refuge until the day comes when he will free the Welsh and the Cornish, his compatriots, from the foreign yoke. It is written that Merlin taught under an apple tree (Ogam, Celtic Traditions 9: pp. 305-9; Celtic Studies 4: pp. 255-74). The Gauls regarded the apple tree as being as sacred as the oak.
Warding off old age, the fruit is a symbol of renewal and eternal youth.
Gervasius tells how Alexander the Great, in his search for the ‘water of life’ in India, found some apples which the priests there took to extend their life to four hundred years. In Scandinavian mythology, the apple is the fruit that regenerates and rejuvenates. The gods eat apples and stay young until the ragna rok, until the end of the present cycle of the universe. (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion p. 295)

If one follows Paul Diel’s analysis, the rounded shape of the apple symbolizes Earth-bound passions or their fulfillment. Divine prohibition was meant to warn mankind against being mastered by those passions which would lead through a species of regression to a materialistic way of life, as opposed to the spiritualized life which is the direction of progressive development. This divine warning makes man aware of these two directions and the necessity of choosing between the way of the Earth-bound passions and that of spirituality. The apple is therefore the symbol of that knowledge and of being placed under the obligation of making choice.