Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
--Emerson
The silence of snow has a quality that most of us crave. Everything is softened, dirt, rubbish and scarred landscapes are smoothed over, made ageless, as the flakes fall. The Peloponnese grew olives when they weren't making war. Fat black Kalamata olives and Spartan warriors, the best the world had seen. And Corinthian columns - they invented columns to hold up temples.Flitting across the water like dragonflies: Like beggars, we must patch the universe as best we can
Wedding-Night Nerves Roads To Happiness
At the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew. Like beggars, we must patch the universe as best we can.
This claim could stand as epigraph to Cold River …
• I have nearly all my flashes of inspiration (such as they are) when I'm doing something else - talking to someone, cycling, putting the clothes on the balcony to dry; [Maybe it is all about the old adage that sex sells. Perhaps all of us, especially the punditocracy, really are puerile adolescents at heart. When love and work collide: hanky panky at the World Bank-y ; O m' god. I'm having a serious attack of Irony Overload. This is no joke. In the last few days, the news has been saturated with extreme instances of Natural Irony. It's dangerous stuff. Left unchecked, you know, IO can progress to Morbid Cynicism (MC), which is terminal. The cases to which I refer are not your run-of-the-mill family-values preacher caught pants-down with a male prostitute. These are more colorful, more exotic performances. Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank prexy and ferocious campaigner against corruption and nepotism, "directed" that his very own girlfriend or house mate or whatever she might be called, be hired at a handsome tax-free salary at a State Department agency where she's to be guaranteed superior evaluations and inordinately large salary increases. It's a variety of cronyism that we can call "nepotistical irony." Consistency Is For Other People ]
• · Too crazybusy for smelling the roses? Then bring your BlackBerry to bed Almost everyone is too busy. We are all running faster and faster on our pointless, addictive wheels of busyness and we have become inefficient, frazzled and fractious. We are so busy responding to random demands we are losing sight of the things that matter. We have stopped thinking and are wasting our lives. Blogging to Build a Community; The appearance of blog-advertising agencies is giving Malaysian bloggers a chance to cash in through online advertising. King Island filled with working bees and bloggers
