The world

Expectation sketches the world;
experience paints it.

Long before (O'Brian)

Indeed the very great majority kill themselves long long before their time. Live as children; grow pale as adolescents; show a flash of life in love; die in their twenties and join the poor things that creep angry and restless about the earth.

Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise

Authority (O'Brian)

Authority is the solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison.

Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise

Lasagna

Last night I made this popular recipe for lasagna.

I will probably tweak it a bit next time, but it's quite good!

Longing to transcend (Huxley)

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Crumbs

Even though I starve, I will not be grateful for crumbs.

Making for ourselves (Einstein)

We try to make for ourselves, in the manner that best suits us, a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; we then attempt in some manner to substitute this cosmos of ours for the world of experience, and thus to surmount it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher and the natural scientist do, each in his own manner. He makes the cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and the serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Albert Einstein

Virtue for a nation (Pullman)

Another virtue that a nation needs is intellectual curiousity. Wakefulness of mind, one might put it. A nation with that quality would be aware of itself, conscious of itself and its history, and every separate thread that makes up the tapestry of its culture. It would believe that the highest knowledge of itself had been expressed by its artists, its writers and poets, and it would teach its children how to know and how to understand and love. We have to be taught how to love, how to love their work, believing that this activity would give them, the children, an important part to play in the self-knowledge and the memory of the nation.

A nation where this virtue was strong, would be active and enquiring of mind, quick to perceive and compare and consider. Such a nation would know at once when a government tried to interfere with its freedoms. It would remember how all those freedoms had been gained, because each one would have a story attached to it, and an attack on any of them would feel like a personal affront. That is the value of wakefulness.

Philip Pullman

The distance

The distance between other and self

is a narrow shelf

with a clock on it.

A clock

and an unread book.

On love

Why do we love love?  Because it frees us from the strictures of sanity.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the only love some people will ever know.

General Tso's chicken

 

Tonight's dinner:  General Tso's chicken.