"Why?" asked Strike heavily."Why what?" said Robin, looking up at him. "Why do people do this?" "Blog, you mean? I don't know...didn't someone once say that the unexamined life isn't worth living?""Yeah, Plato," said Strike, "but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it." -The Silkworm (Robert Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling)When I read these lines in The…
Although the facts of time and place have receded into legend, like many historical records of the birth of Modernism, it is certain that a packet of Japanese prints arrived in Paris around 1860 and instantly created a widening wave of amazement, incredulity, and exhilaration. The shock of encounter was so great, and the moment…
So this was what artists did: Tamara looked up, looked down, moved her hand, looked up again. Choosing among the many slender, long-handled brushes she kept in a green glass bowl, Tamara dabbed a sheet of white wood with a dozen different shades of an earthy yellow she called ochre. When she hit on a…
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”…
Being here in Finland, it's fairly tricky. I'm happy the temperature was above freezing today and that the snow is melting; the downside to this, however, is that there are now crazy puddles to navigate (my legs are short; I'm practically doing Olympic style leaps across the street). Also, without ever having studied the language…
Maybe what cold is, is the timewe measure the love we have always had, secretly,for our own bones, the hard knife-edged lovefor the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybethat is what it means the beautyof the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.In the season of snow,in the immeasurable cold,we grow cruel…
For a while, what with all this moving and settling I was becoming frantic, schizophrenic, and even, perhaps, necrophilic, combined with anguish, frustration and ill-temper. But, finally getting into the book-work again, I find I work awfully slowly. There is so much that has been written, by people so much more professional than I, that I…
On four or five occasions I came out of the library door at exactly the moment that a student passed by wheeling an upright bass along the cobbled street, like someone guiding an overgrown child. Sometimes he had just passed the instant before, and other times he was about to pass. But once I exited…
Dining with Dostoevsky 