Saturday, October 17, 2015

Uncertainty and Our Search for Meaning

“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it.”
~ Uncertainty and Our Search for Meaning

“The sole purpose of human existence,” Carl Jung wrote in his notebooks, “is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

“Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. … But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity?” The New Yorker 


“Imagine your house getting burnt, photos and relics, your treasures, photos of your kids, travels, tools of the trade, everything,” he told Nine News.

“And I’m lucky cause I’m standing here but ... I don’t know what to say.”

Larissa MacFarquhar writes about do-gooders who “open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.”  Extreme Altruism

“How little it takes to make or break us!” How strange and unpredictable life is
Gabbie - Sasha
“Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright nature fights in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed.” Meanings


“The question for authors to consider in this brave new world of mimicry, both professional and otherwise, is to what extent they consider their characters to be theirs and theirs alone. For most, it isn’t something that will become an issue during their lifetime: Copyright law stipulates that books only enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author, even if most fanfic writers aren’t limited in terms of what they can post online.” The Atlantic 





“The Tumbleweeds sleep in beds that have been placed throughout the bookshop — next to the piano, above the Mirror of Love — and there are generally around four people living in the bookstore at a time. One of George’s rules that still remains is that all Tumbles must read a book a day. (They also help open and close the shop, work for two hours a day, and help out with the weekly readings.)” Vice











The album is Erroll Garner’s The Complete Concert by the Sea, a newly released three-CD set about which vast clouds of enthusiastic prose, none of it even slightly overstated, have already been generated, not just in the jazz press but in such mainstream publications as the New York Times and my own Wall Street Journal.
One of Garner’s albums was called The Most Happy Piano, and that sums him up very nicely. As Joseph Epstein wrote of H.L. Mencken, “He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre.”You simply cannot listen to his best recordings without breaking out in an ear-to-ear grin.

Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education: “A new book celebrates 100 of the academics, artists and activists who have been boldest in crossing disciplinary boundaries. The project is the brainchild of Gianluigi Ricuperati, creative director of the Domus Academy in Milan, a private postgraduate school of design that describes itself as “a living laboratory, an incubator of talents and a springboard for interdisciplinary adventures”. In today’s world, he told Times Higher Education, “the most exciting ideas come in the liminal and interstitial spaces between disciplines. The digital revolution forces us all to think in terms of numbers, pictures and words. That is why the world, including the academic world, has become less rigid.” To compile the list that forms the basis for 100 Global Minds: The Most Daring Cross-disciplinary Thinkers in the World