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

«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.

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

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

Manifesto of the Romantic, Chapter 1 (Ayn Rand)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romantic_Manifesto

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. 

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.