Thursday, December 11, 2014
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Garth Williams & Norman Rockwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Williamshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell
The Rabbits' Wedding by G.W. »
Teacher's Birthday by N.R. »
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Hafez
I Got Kin
Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.
Love
So God will think.
"Ahhhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls."
Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.
Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.
Becoming Human
Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
"His great visions of God" he felt he was having.
He asked me for confirmation, saying,
"Are these wondrous dreams true?"
I replied, "How many goats do you have?"
He looked surprised and said,
"I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!"
And I spoke again saying,
"Yes, brother - how many do you have?"
"Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two."
"And how many wives?"
Again he looked surprised, then said,
"Four."
"How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?"
And to all he answered.
Then I said,
"You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,
More kind to every creature and plant
That you know."
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
"The Closing of The American Mind" by Allan Bloom @ 1987
http://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200
Preface
The teacher, particularly the teacher dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now, ever seeking to understand the former and to assess the capacities of the latter to approach it. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft.
What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind. This in turn can best be discovered in each generation's tastes, amusements, and especially angers (this is above all true in an age that prides itself on calm self-awareness).
The teacher's standpoint is not arbitrary. It is neither simply dependent on what students think they want or happen to be in this place or time, nor is it imposed on him by the demands of a particular society or the vagaries of the market. ... he (a teacher) is, willy-nilly, guided by the awareness, or the divination, that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfillment is his task.
No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded, the teacher may be more or less limited, but his activity is solicited by something beyond him that at the same time provides him with a standard for judging his students' capacity and achievement. Moreover there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. The soul, so the teacher must think, may at the outset of education require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient.
These are the reasons that help to explain the perversity of an adult who prefers the company of youths to that of grownups. He prefers the promising "might be" to the defective "is." Such an adult is subject to many temptations—particularly vanity and the desire to propagandize rather than teach—and the very activity brings with it the danger of preferring teaching to knowing, of adapting oneself to what the students can or want to learn, of knowing oneself only by one's students.
Thus, teaching can be a threat to philosophy because philosophizing is a solitary quest, and he who pursues it must never look to an audience. But it is too much to ask that teachers be philosophers, and a bit of attachment to one's audience is almost inevitable.
A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. Despite all the efforts to pervert it (a few of which will be discussed in this book), the question that every young person asks, "Who am I?," the powerful urge to follow the Delphic command, "Know thyself," which is born in each of us, means in the first place "What is man?" And in our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers and thinking about them. Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature or our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. Although it is foolish to believe that book learning is anything like the whole of education, it is always necessary, particularly in ages when there is a poverty of living examples of the possible high human types. And book learning is most of what a teacher can give—properly administered in an atmosphere in which its relation to life is plausible. Life will happen to his students. The most he can hope is that what he might give will inform life. Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called civilized.
It is sometimes said that these advantaged youths have less need of our attention and resources, that they already have enough. But they, above all, most need education, inasmuch as the greatest talents are most difficult to perfect, and the more complex the nature the more susceptible it is to perversion.
There is no need to prove the importance of education; but it should be remarked that for modern nations, which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face.
Forward by Saul Bellow
I couldn't say why I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment. But gainfulness, utility, prudence, business, had no hold on me.
Professor Bloom's book makes me fear that the book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the "learned" who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
... poets and novelists will never be the legislators and teachers of mankind. That poets—artists—should give new eyes to human beings, inducing them to view the world differently, converting them from fixed modes of experience, is ambition enough, if one must offer a purposive account of the artist's project. What makes that project singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thoughtworld, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed. Therefore the artist, whether or not he views himself as an intellectual, is involved in thoughts-truggles. Thinking alone will never cure what ails him, and any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
... the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society's conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences. Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.
Introduction: Our Virtue
The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.
Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings —is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.
Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being... Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality.
This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.
The palpable difference between these two can easily be found in the changed understanding of what it means to be an American. The old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man's natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers. The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old World in favor of a new and easily acquired education. This did not necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles. There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.
The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward-looking. It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abandonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?
But the right to freedom of religion belonged to the realm of knowledge. Such rights are not matters of opinion. No weakness of conviction was desired here. All to the contrary, the sphere of rights was to be the arena of moral passion in a democracy.
There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute.
The gradual movement away from rights to openness was apparent...
History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice.
... So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one.
In twentieth-century social science, however, the common good disappears and along with it the negative view of minorities. The very idea of majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities. This breaks the delicate balance between majority and minority in Constitutional thought. In such a perspective, where there is no common good, minorities are no longer problematic, and the protection of them emerges as the central function of government.
The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right... By contrast, the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement—leaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptance—had at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.
Yet the Constitution does not promise respect for blacks, whites, yellows, Catholics, Protestants, or Jews. It guarantees the protection of the rights of individual human beings. This has not proved to be enough, however, to what is perhaps by now a majority of Americans.
The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions. It is the rarest of occurrences to find a youngster who has been infused by this education with a longing to know all about China or the Romans or the Jews.
There is an indifference to such things, for relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.
Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing.
The teacher, particularly the teacher dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now, ever seeking to understand the former and to assess the capacities of the latter to approach it. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft.
What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind. This in turn can best be discovered in each generation's tastes, amusements, and especially angers (this is above all true in an age that prides itself on calm self-awareness).
The teacher's standpoint is not arbitrary. It is neither simply dependent on what students think they want or happen to be in this place or time, nor is it imposed on him by the demands of a particular society or the vagaries of the market. ... he (a teacher) is, willy-nilly, guided by the awareness, or the divination, that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfillment is his task.
No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded, the teacher may be more or less limited, but his activity is solicited by something beyond him that at the same time provides him with a standard for judging his students' capacity and achievement. Moreover there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. The soul, so the teacher must think, may at the outset of education require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient.
These are the reasons that help to explain the perversity of an adult who prefers the company of youths to that of grownups. He prefers the promising "might be" to the defective "is." Such an adult is subject to many temptations—particularly vanity and the desire to propagandize rather than teach—and the very activity brings with it the danger of preferring teaching to knowing, of adapting oneself to what the students can or want to learn, of knowing oneself only by one's students.
Thus, teaching can be a threat to philosophy because philosophizing is a solitary quest, and he who pursues it must never look to an audience. But it is too much to ask that teachers be philosophers, and a bit of attachment to one's audience is almost inevitable.
A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. Despite all the efforts to pervert it (a few of which will be discussed in this book), the question that every young person asks, "Who am I?," the powerful urge to follow the Delphic command, "Know thyself," which is born in each of us, means in the first place "What is man?" And in our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers and thinking about them. Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature or our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. Although it is foolish to believe that book learning is anything like the whole of education, it is always necessary, particularly in ages when there is a poverty of living examples of the possible high human types. And book learning is most of what a teacher can give—properly administered in an atmosphere in which its relation to life is plausible. Life will happen to his students. The most he can hope is that what he might give will inform life. Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called civilized.
It is sometimes said that these advantaged youths have less need of our attention and resources, that they already have enough. But they, above all, most need education, inasmuch as the greatest talents are most difficult to perfect, and the more complex the nature the more susceptible it is to perversion.
There is no need to prove the importance of education; but it should be remarked that for modern nations, which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face.
Forward by Saul Bellow
I couldn't say why I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment. But gainfulness, utility, prudence, business, had no hold on me.
Professor Bloom's book makes me fear that the book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the "learned" who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
... poets and novelists will never be the legislators and teachers of mankind. That poets—artists—should give new eyes to human beings, inducing them to view the world differently, converting them from fixed modes of experience, is ambition enough, if one must offer a purposive account of the artist's project. What makes that project singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thoughtworld, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed. Therefore the artist, whether or not he views himself as an intellectual, is involved in thoughts-truggles. Thinking alone will never cure what ails him, and any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
... the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society's conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences. Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.
Introduction: Our Virtue
The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.
Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings —is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.
Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being... Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality.
This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.
The palpable difference between these two can easily be found in the changed understanding of what it means to be an American. The old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man's natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers. The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old World in favor of a new and easily acquired education. This did not necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles. There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.
The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward-looking. It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abandonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?
But the right to freedom of religion belonged to the realm of knowledge. Such rights are not matters of opinion. No weakness of conviction was desired here. All to the contrary, the sphere of rights was to be the arena of moral passion in a democracy.
There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute.
The gradual movement away from rights to openness was apparent...
History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice.
... So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one.
In twentieth-century social science, however, the common good disappears and along with it the negative view of minorities. The very idea of majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities. This breaks the delicate balance between majority and minority in Constitutional thought. In such a perspective, where there is no common good, minorities are no longer problematic, and the protection of them emerges as the central function of government.
The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right... By contrast, the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement—leaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptance—had at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.
Yet the Constitution does not promise respect for blacks, whites, yellows, Catholics, Protestants, or Jews. It guarantees the protection of the rights of individual human beings. This has not proved to be enough, however, to what is perhaps by now a majority of Americans.
The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions. It is the rarest of occurrences to find a youngster who has been infused by this education with a longing to know all about China or the Romans or the Jews.
There is an indifference to such things, for relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.
Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
"The Adventures of Pincocchio" by Carlo Collodi @ 1965 (translated by M A Murray)
http://www.amazon.com/adventures-Pincocchio-Companion-library-classics/dp/B0007ERPH0/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
{Thoughts: Pinocchio's journey is the transformation from a little boy to a man.}
... when boys who have behaved badly turn over a new leaf and become good, they have the power of bringing contentment and happiness to their families. p190
Boys who minister tenderly to their parents, and assist them in their misery and infirmities, are deserving of great praise and affection, even if they cannot be cited as examples of obedience and good behavior. p189
... we should show courtesy to everyone, if we wish it to be extended to us in our hour of need. p184
Stolen money never fructifies. p183
Boys who refuse to study, and turn their backs upon books, schools, and masters, to pass their time in play and amusements, sooner or later come to a bad hand... p149
Boys are always very ready to promise; but generally they are little given to keep their word. p138
... his father had often told him that a good action is never lost. p125
Beware of bad companions! p121
Let me tell you that every man, whether he is born rich or poor, is obliged to do something in this world—to occupy himself, to work. Woe to those who lead slothful lives. Sloth is a dreadful illness and must be cured at once, in childhood. If not, when we are old it can never be cured. p112
I saw from the sincerity of your grief that you had a good heart; and when boys have good hearts, even if they are scamps and have bad habits, there is always something to hope for: that is, there is always hope that they will turn to better ways. That is why I came to look for you here. p111
He was ashamed to beg, for his father had always preached to him that no one had a right to beg except the aged and the infirm. The really poor in this world, deserving of compassion and assistance, are only those who from age or sickness are no longer able to earn their own bread with the labor of their hands. p106
This idea of finding himself alone, alone, all alone, in the midst of this great uninhabited country, made him so melancholy that he was just beginning to cry. 104
Hunger knows neither caprice nor greediness. p101
What is the good of accusing the dead? ... The dead are dead, and the best thing to be done is to leave them in peace! p95
Hunger, my boy, is not a good reason for appropriating what does not belong to us. p90
Today I have learned at least that to put a few pennies honestly together it is necessary to know how to earn them, either by the work of our own hands or by the cleverness of our own brains. p83
... telling lies—the most disgraceful fault that a boy can have. p76
Remember that boys who are bent on following their caprices, and will have their own way, sooner or later repent it. p57
Don't trust, my boy, those who promise to make you rich in a day. Usually they are either made or rogues! p57
... do you know that in that way you will grew up a perfect donkey, and that every-one will make game of you? p23
Woe to those boys who rebel against their parents, and ran away capriciously from home. They will never come to any good in the world, and sooner or later they will repent bitterly. p23
... when boys who have behaved badly turn over a new leaf and become good, they have the power of bringing contentment and happiness to their families. p190
Boys who minister tenderly to their parents, and assist them in their misery and infirmities, are deserving of great praise and affection, even if they cannot be cited as examples of obedience and good behavior. p189
... we should show courtesy to everyone, if we wish it to be extended to us in our hour of need. p184
Stolen money never fructifies. p183
Boys who refuse to study, and turn their backs upon books, schools, and masters, to pass their time in play and amusements, sooner or later come to a bad hand... p149
Boys are always very ready to promise; but generally they are little given to keep their word. p138
... his father had often told him that a good action is never lost. p125
Beware of bad companions! p121
Let me tell you that every man, whether he is born rich or poor, is obliged to do something in this world—to occupy himself, to work. Woe to those who lead slothful lives. Sloth is a dreadful illness and must be cured at once, in childhood. If not, when we are old it can never be cured. p112
I saw from the sincerity of your grief that you had a good heart; and when boys have good hearts, even if they are scamps and have bad habits, there is always something to hope for: that is, there is always hope that they will turn to better ways. That is why I came to look for you here. p111
He was ashamed to beg, for his father had always preached to him that no one had a right to beg except the aged and the infirm. The really poor in this world, deserving of compassion and assistance, are only those who from age or sickness are no longer able to earn their own bread with the labor of their hands. p106
This idea of finding himself alone, alone, all alone, in the midst of this great uninhabited country, made him so melancholy that he was just beginning to cry. 104
Hunger knows neither caprice nor greediness. p101
What is the good of accusing the dead? ... The dead are dead, and the best thing to be done is to leave them in peace! p95
Hunger, my boy, is not a good reason for appropriating what does not belong to us. p90
Today I have learned at least that to put a few pennies honestly together it is necessary to know how to earn them, either by the work of our own hands or by the cleverness of our own brains. p83
... telling lies—the most disgraceful fault that a boy can have. p76
Remember that boys who are bent on following their caprices, and will have their own way, sooner or later repent it. p57
Don't trust, my boy, those who promise to make you rich in a day. Usually they are either made or rogues! p57
... do you know that in that way you will grew up a perfect donkey, and that every-one will make game of you? p23
Woe to those boys who rebel against their parents, and ran away capriciously from home. They will never come to any good in the world, and sooner or later they will repent bitterly. p23
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
望月怀远
海上生明月，天涯共此时。情人怨遥夜，竟夕起相思。
灭烛怜光满，披衣觉露滋。不堪盈手赠，还寝梦佳期。
~ 张九龄 (唐代)
********************
译文 (作者: 佚名):
茫茫的海上升起一轮明月，此时你我都在天涯共相望。
有情之人都怨恨月夜漫长，整夜里不眠而把亲人怀想。
熄灭蜡烛怜爱这满屋月光，我披衣徘徊深感夜露寒凉。
不能把美好的月色捧给你，只望能够与你相见在梦乡。
Contemporary Chinese translation (translator: unknown):
A bright moon was born on the sea, which we both could look at from different locations.
Lovers complain the long moon night, because they miss their loved one all night.
The moon light brightens the room without candles, I wander back and forth feeling the chilly air.
As I cannot bring you the beautiful moon light, so I hope that I will see you in my dreams.
灭烛怜光满，披衣觉露滋。不堪盈手赠，还寝梦佳期。
~ 张九龄 (唐代)
********************
译文 (作者: 佚名):
茫茫的海上升起一轮明月，此时你我都在天涯共相望。
有情之人都怨恨月夜漫长，整夜里不眠而把亲人怀想。
熄灭蜡烛怜爱这满屋月光，我披衣徘徊深感夜露寒凉。
不能把美好的月色捧给你，只望能够与你相见在梦乡。
Contemporary Chinese translation (translator: unknown):
A bright moon was born on the sea, which we both could look at from different locations.
Lovers complain the long moon night, because they miss their loved one all night.
The moon light brightens the room without candles, I wander back and forth feeling the chilly air.
As I cannot bring you the beautiful moon light, so I hope that I will see you in my dreams.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
My River
My river runs to thee.
Blue sea, wilt thou welcome me?
My river awaits reply.
Oh! sea, look graciously.
I’ll fetch thee brooks
from spotted nooks.
Say, sea, Take me!
~ Emily Dickinson
Blue sea, wilt thou welcome me?
My river awaits reply.
Oh! sea, look graciously.
I’ll fetch thee brooks
from spotted nooks.
Say, sea, Take me!
~ Emily Dickinson
Monday, July 14, 2014
班扎古鲁白玛的沉默 - The Silence of Vadjra Guru Pema
你见，或者不见我，我就在那里，不悲不喜。
It’s doesn’t matter if you see me or not.
I am standing right there, with no emotion.
你念，或者不念我，情就在那里，不来不去。
It’s doesn’t matter if you miss me or not.
The feeling is right there, and it isn’t going anywhere.
你爱，或者不爱我，爱就在那里，不增不减。
It’s doesn’t matter if you love me or not.
Love is right there, it is not going to change.
你跟，或者不跟我，我的手就在你的手里，不舍不弃。
It’s doesn’t matter if you are with me or not.
My hand is in your hand, and I am not going to let go.
来我怀里，或者，让我住进你的心里
Let me embrace you, or
Let me live in your heart entirely.
默然 相爱，寂静 喜欢。
Silence Love, Calmness Joy.
~ 扎西拉姆·多多
It’s doesn’t matter if you see me or not.
I am standing right there, with no emotion.
你念，或者不念我，情就在那里，不来不去。
It’s doesn’t matter if you miss me or not.
The feeling is right there, and it isn’t going anywhere.
你爱，或者不爱我，爱就在那里，不增不减。
It’s doesn’t matter if you love me or not.
Love is right there, it is not going to change.
你跟，或者不跟我，我的手就在你的手里，不舍不弃。
It’s doesn’t matter if you are with me or not.
My hand is in your hand, and I am not going to let go.
来我怀里，或者，让我住进你的心里
Let me embrace you, or
Let me live in your heart entirely.
默然 相爱，寂静 喜欢。
Silence Love, Calmness Joy.
~ 扎西拉姆·多多
The Night has a thousand eyes
The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
~ Francis William Bourdillon
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Saturday, July 5, 2014
The Anna Akhmatova File (1989) - English Subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNonUUEdWyE
There is something odd about the human soul... Poems, even the greatest, fail to make the author happy. Pushkin knew. He was the author of "The Bronze Horseman". Yet, he wasn't happy. But we can say with confidence that more than anything else Pushkin wanted to write more.
~ Anna Akhmatova
There is something odd about the human soul... Poems, even the greatest, fail to make the author happy. Pushkin knew. He was the author of "The Bronze Horseman". Yet, he wasn't happy. But we can say with confidence that more than anything else Pushkin wanted to write more.
~ Anna Akhmatova
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
«Why I write» by George Orwell 1946
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think that there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1) Sheer egoism.
... The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, in deed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2) Aesthetic enthusiasm.
...
3) Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4) Political purpose—using the word "political" in the widest possible sense.
... Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
[my question: what about the writer's spiritual yarning or religious experience? Should this be #5?]
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.
1) Sheer egoism.
... The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, in deed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2) Aesthetic enthusiasm.
...
3) Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4) Political purpose—using the word "political" in the widest possible sense.
... Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
[my question: what about the writer's spiritual yarning or religious experience? Should this be #5?]
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Aldous Huxley's vision
Aldous Huxley interview-1958 (FULL)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQZ-2iMUR0
Aldous Huxley - Speech at UC Berkeley, The Ultimate Revolution 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RX-iUfPJ9I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQZ-2iMUR0
Aldous Huxley - Speech at UC Berkeley, The Ultimate Revolution 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RX-iUfPJ9I
Monday, June 16, 2014
Neil Postman
Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death Part I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRabb6_Gr2Y
Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death Part II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHd31L6XPEQ
What is lacking in schools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GslzLHrve2M
http://brilliant-learning.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/04/Neil-Postman-The-End-of-Education.pdf
Technology is no substitute for human values
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovJr_LmAP8
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRabb6_Gr2Y
Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death Part II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHd31L6XPEQ
What is lacking in schools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GslzLHrve2M
http://brilliant-learning.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/04/Neil-Postman-The-End-of-Education.pdf
Technology is no substitute for human values
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovJr_LmAP8
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Christ Has No Body
Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
卜算子 • 我住长江头
卜算子
– 李之仪 (北宋)
我住长江头，
君住长江尾。
日日思君不见君，
共饮长江水。
此水几时休，
此恨几时已。
只愿君心似我心，
定不负相思意。
Song of Divination
– Li Zhiyi (11th century)
I live upstream and you downstream.
From night to night of you I dream.
Unlike the stream you're not in view,
Though we both drink from River Blue.
Where will the water no more flow?
When will my grief no longer grow?
I wish your heart would be like mine,
Then not in vain for you I pine.
– 李之仪 (北宋)
我住长江头，
君住长江尾。
日日思君不见君，
共饮长江水。
此水几时休，
此恨几时已。
只愿君心似我心，
定不负相思意。
Song of Divination
– Li Zhiyi (11th century)
I live upstream and you downstream.
From night to night of you I dream.
Unlike the stream you're not in view,
Though we both drink from River Blue.
Where will the water no more flow?
When will my grief no longer grow?
I wish your heart would be like mine,
Then not in vain for you I pine.
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