The most dangerous condition for a man or a nation is when his intellectual side is more developed than his spiritual. Is that not exactly the condition of the world today?
— Arthur Conan Doyle, born in 1858 not 1958
'Like flying down a mountain': The surfers who braved Sydney’s wild swell
More swimmers are embracing the idea of doing laps in freezing-cold water as an actual sport. We went to the Memphremagog Winter Swim Festival in Vermont to make sense of the lunacy. And dive in.
What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America
Filmmaker Warwick Thornton's needs are more prosaic. “When I'm on location, I always ask the producer for a unit with a stove, or a house with a kitchen,” he says.
Warwick Thornton: the man and his demons, alone together
“Jozef Imrich has written the War and Peace of escapes. Havel tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life, Imrich practiced what they preached… Citizen journalist’s job is like a baker’s work — his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week, they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.”
Cold River
Short Talk on Kafka on Hölderlin | by Anne Carson | The New York Review of Books.
Here is one of my favorite Hölderlin poems, in my own rough translation:
Half of Life
With yellow pears
And filled with wild roses
The land hangs into the lake,
You lovely swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the holy sobering water.
Ah, me. Where will I find, when
Winter comes, the flowers,
And where the sunshine
And the shadows of Earth?
The walls stand speechless
And cold. The weathercocks
Rattle in the wind.
After her death, Gordon began sorting through the thousands of poems left behind, from one written in 1983 that opens “Coming home in the rain / To my home again / My kids, my wife. / The heart of my life,” to 2017’s Spring Without You. The latter begins: “No, it could never be the same – / And yet the cherry tree two doors down / Exploded in pink as if to drown / Our winter blues and put to shame / Old tears.”
MEdia Dragon 🐉 wishes he created the website: A Malchken Love in Verse
Top Shots: The World's Best Photojournalism
What bully does not claim his violence is just?
What despicable coward does not heed the bully’s threat, “You are with me or you are against me” ?