When Albert Einstein met Charlie Chaplin in 1931, Einstein said, "What I admire most about your art is its universality. You do not say a word, and yet the world understands you."
"It's true." Replied Chaplin, "But your fame is even greater. The world admires you, when no one understands you."
Snapshots …
IV
He kicked a stone along the sidewalk
For a bit this afternoon, while walking back
From Center City, where he went looking
For a book, which he found, but found as well
He didn’t just now want after all, which is not to say
The trip was a waste of time, since
He did, in the end, get a kick out of it.He kicked a stone along the sidewalk
For a bit this afternoon, while walking back
From Center City, where he went looking
For a book, which he found, but found as well
He didn’t just now want after all, which is not to say
The trip was a waste of time, since
He did, in the end, get a kick out of it
Surveying the Vintage Market at Texas’s Wildest Antique Fair
On a Tuesday morning in late October, Sheila Youngblood got in her Range Rover and headed past fields of grazing horses toward Marburger Farm, in Round Top, Texas. The morning drizzle had just let up, and yellow wildflowers dotted the roadside. Soon, traffic slowed to a crawl, and the wildflowers were replaced by tents full of a bewildering array of merchandise. For most of the year, Round Top has an official population of eighty-seven, but in October and March an estimated hundred thousand visitors come here to visit a sprawling antique market, one of the biggest in the world.
Read the full article on The New Yorker
The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
All of us experience altered states of consciousness all the time, without the aid of mind-altering substances. When blood sugar plummets with hunger, a wholly different moodscape takes hold. Under the monthly tempest of hormones, almost a wholly different person can emerge.
Every night we feel the edges of consciousness as we slip into the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. Every day we engage in various delusions and willful blindnesses in order to maintain our self-image, keep our imperfect relationships intact, and guard our deepest hopes from the fearsome fangs of reality.