All that’s near grows faint and far;
But the first to rise has risen,
High it shines, the evening star!
All is in uncertain motion,
Creeping mists enshroud the sky;
Gulfs of night as deep as ocean
Mirrored on the dark lake lie.
Now I sense the gleam and glowing
Of the moonlight’s eastering day;
Slender willow-tresses flowing
With the nearby waters play.
Through the flickering shadows lunar
Magic dances, coolness seems
To have touched my eyes and soothes me,
Steals into my inmost dreams.
~ via Shoalhaven Botanical Gardens
Native trees and
shrubs on offer include
tea trees, bottle brush,
correas, grevilleas,
Queensland black bean,
and westringia. The native lilies include gymea lily, native
ginger and spider lily. A variety of native
grasses and ground
covers are available including cut leaf daisies,
Canberra grass, purple
fountain grass and tussock grass.
~ Selection of stunning natives - Shoalhaven heads - Heads News
~ Selection of stunning natives - Shoalhaven heads - Heads News
You'll Love 'Altered Carbon', like MEdia Dragon, – but First You Got to Hate It
“One can’t write directly about the soul,”, Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.” So with happiness — as slippery as “the soul,” as certain to crumble upon deconstruction. Philosophers havecontemplated its nature for millennia, psychologists have attempted to unearth its existential building blocks and delineate its stages. And yet at the heart of it remains a mystery — wildly various across lives and within any one life, a fickle visitation unbeckonable by external lures, as anyone who has sorrowed on a sunny-skied day knows. “There’s no accounting for happiness,” Jane Kenyon wrote in her sublime poem about the ultimate elusion, “or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.”
One of the simplest, fullest definitions of happiness I’ve encountered comes from Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) in Specimen Days (public library) — the splendid collection of his prose fragments, letters, and diary entries on subjects like the wisdom of trees, the singular power of music, how art imbues even the bleakest moments with beauty, and what makes life worth living.
The first group of emerging playwrights to benefit from Audible's $5m fund will include two British writers: Gary McNair, from Glasgow, and James Fritz, from London.
Tyranny Of The Five-Paragraph Essay (Or How Not To Think)
“The foundation is the five-paragraph essay, a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US. In college, the model expands into the five-section research paper. Then in graduate school comes the five-chapter doctoral dissertation. Same jars, same order. By the time the doctoral student becomes a professor, the pattern is set. The Rule of Five is thoroughly fixed in muscle memory, and the scholar is on track to produce a string of journal articles that follow from it. Then it’s time to pass the model on to the next generation. The cycle continues.”
How We Tell Stories To Make Ourselves Feel Better About Things That Aren’t True
‘Confabulation’ comes from the Latin fabula (‘story’) which can be either a historical account or a fairytale. When we confabulate, we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story. As we are not aware that our story is fictional, this is very different from a lie: we have no intention to deceive. So in confabulation there is a mismatch between what we aim to do (tell a true story) and what we end up doing (tell a fictional story).
Chinese Bookstore Offers Bibliotherapy
Women in fiction Since the birth of modern English-language novels in the 1700s, male and female characters from Paul Atreides to Elizabeth Bennet have laughed, grinned, felt and acted through their pages. A new study conducted using a machine learning algorithm has offered fresh perspective on their histories. “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction,” published this week in the journal Cultural Analytics, analyzed the presentation of gender in more than 100,000 novels, finding a paradox when it came to novels of the 20th century: as the rigid gender roles seemed to dissipate, indicating more equality between the sexes, the number of women characters— and proportion of women authors—decreased.
`You Are with Me for Life, Pip!'
“. . . during the war, people voraciously read War and Peaceas a way of checking themselves (and not Tolstoy, whose validity no one doubted). And the reader said to him or herself: so, it means what I’m feeling is correct; that’s how it is. Whoever had the strength to read, voraciously read War and Peace.”
Of course, many of us read War and Peace that way. It encourages full immersion. I know several men still in love with Natasha Rostov and who suspect they have too much in common with Pierre Bezukhov. Barskova quotes Panteleev again:
“In the most horrific days of that winter I read Dickens’sGreat Expectations. The book had just come out in a new translation; I bought it at a stall in the street. I read it by night, by the light of a smoky night-lamp. And I know that for me that night-lamp, its soot, and my breath-vapor have become forever linked with everything I was reading about, with the spirit and gloom and light and smells of Dickens’s novel. Whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, you are with me for life, Pip! You’re a blokadnik.”
Richard FlanaganAustralian author'Address to the National Press Club'LIFT WEIGHTS AND LIVE LONGER. Better, tooVLADIMIR:
You must be happy too, deep down, if you only knew it.
ESTRAGON:
Happy about what?
VLADIMIR:
To be back with me again.
ESTRAGON:Would you say so?
VLADIMIR:
Say you are, even if it's not degrees, and offer some solutions.
New Bookshop of note
What an amazing day filled with exploration of native flora and fauna at Shoalhaven Heads ... Roger is a walking encyclopaedia of native plants and propagation ... He even has the best looking rare beauty Wollemia Pine ... The secret is out and all lovers of nature are welcome to explore this amazing spot on earth surrounded by sea, rivers and most of all the national park Shoalhaven Heads Native Botanic Garden | Shoalhaven Attraction - Visit NSW"