“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
– Bertrand Russell

As the weather slowly winds itself up for winter (and your ears are hurting with raw dawn bike rides), that summer chaos recently gone by(e) is now irritating, those adventures in unknown cities are difficult; holistic simplicity is here to introvert you.

“It is enough to play a single note beautifully.”

Arvo Pärt is a post-modern minimalist composer, but nevermind that — his art is beautiful. Like church bells and numinous silence, this intimate work sends a steady finger through the human voice, uplifting and sedating you with all the purity of refracted lights. The church recording is a quiet one, so turn up the volume and listen for the scratch and hiss, the pigment overdraping.

Enjoy.

( album )

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

“And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created. “

“Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare… always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

“interpretation demands something of the creative instinct. If you are a composer, you have an affinity with other composers. You can make contact with their imaginations, knowing something of their problems and their ideals. You can give their works color. That is the most important thing for me in my interpretations, color. So you make music live. Without color it is dead.”

“The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.”

“The only film that I want to make, I will never make because it is impossible. It is a film on love, or of love, or with love. To speak in the mouth, to touch the breast, for women to imagine and to see the body, the sex of the man, a caress a shoulder, things as difficult to show and to intend as horror, and war, and sickness are. I do not understand why, and I suffer from it. What to do then, since I cannot make films simple and logical like Roberto’s humble and cynical like Bresson’s, austere and comic like Jerry Lewis’, lucid and calm like Hawks’, rigorous and tender like François’, hard and plaintive like the two Jacques’, courageous and sincere like Resnais’, pessimistic and American like Fuller’s romantic and Italian like Bertolucci’s, Polish and despairing like Skolimowski’s communist and crazy like Mme. Dovzhenko’s. Yes, what to do?”

For being one of the most influential philosophers of science, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t a single picture of Norwood Russell Hanson on google, much less a book of is under 200 dollars. Most of his work was centered around the then-(and now)-novel concept that the act and language of observation is loaded with theory and is filtered through those theories. He put is a lot better than I could:

“Seeing is an experience. A retinal reaction is only a physical state… People, not their eyes, see. Cameras, and eye-balls, are blind… there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.”

Theology was another subject that received a lot of writings from N. R.’s pen. Check out this winning collection of essays edited by every college student’s least favorite rhetorician, Stephen Toulmin. On the hiddenness of god:

“God exists” could in principle be established for all factually — it just happens not to be, certainly not for everyone! Suppose, however, that next Tuesday morning, just after breakfast, all of us in this one world are knocked to our knees by a percussive and ear-shattering thunderclap. Snow swirls; leaves drop from the trees; the earth heaves and buckles; buildings topple and towers tumble; the sky is ablaze with an eerie, silvery light. Just then, as all the people of this world look up, the heavens open — the clouds pull apart ‚ revealing an unbelievably immense and radiant-like Zeus figure, towering above us like a hundred Everests. He frowns darkly as lightening plays across the features of his Michelangeloid face. He then points down — at me! — and explains, for every man and child to hear: “I have had quite enough of your too-clever logic-chopping and word-watching in matters of theology. Be assured, N.R. Hanson, that I most certainly do exist.” … ¶ Please do not dismiss this as a playful, irreverent Disneyoid contrivance. The conceptual point here is that if such a remarkable event were to occur, I for one should certainly be convinced that God does exist. That matter of fact would have been settled once and for all time… That God exists would, though this encounter, have been confirmed for me and for everyone else in a manner every bit as direct as that involved in any non-controversial factual claim.

Read the book online

This is from an absolutely great play that I highly recommend. One of the best I’ve read.

[DYSART is a highly regarded and effective psychiatrist]

DYSART: The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes — all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills — like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also — beyond question — I have cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this God, in both his aspects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful Gods. And at what length … Sacrifices to Zeus took at he most, surely, sixty seconds each. Sacrifices to the Normal can take as long as sixty months.