Over the past few months I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library, so I thought I’d write a post about the nature of ‘the library’ and what it means to me. My somewhat rose tinted view of libraries looks a bit like this, constructed through the libraries I have read about in Discworld books […]
I’m growing into the idea that a good death is not so much a death where I have chosen the time and place, but where I have some level of control over the event. I used to believe the best way to die was in the setting of my making, my choosing; not necessarily suicide, […]
I'm feeling a real sensitivity to the aesthetic at the moment, a real harmony with my own thoughts and senses. Sometimes I have these periods, often only moments, when my mind really wakes up and comes into focus. It's as if everything around me takes on a subtly different form for an instant, and then […]
I've been reading some of Plato's works recently, specifically his allegory of the cave. For those who don't already know what it is about, this is the description from wikipedia, or you can read the original text at the link above.
Allegory of the cave
Imagine prisoners, who have been chained since birth deep inside a cave: not […]
I recently read Jean-Paul Sartre's book Nausea. It was the greatest book I have read in a long long time, he writes so well and really gets to the heart of the humanity in the story, bringing out the underlying feelings of his character like no-one I have read before. His writing style (in this […]
Sometimes I find it so hard to sit down and write. The ideas of what to type just don't materialize in my head; I can go looking for all the stimulus I know of and still I can't pin anything down that I can work into a post. You would think that only doing this […]
This is a quote from “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf:
Life for both sexes —and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement —is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in […]
I am currently reading “Fear and Trembling” by Søren Kierkegaard which (more or less) opens with the following passage:
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable […]
I am currently reading an excellent book by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges called Labyrinths. It’s a collection of some of his short stories and fictional essays. When I say short, I mean very short, most of them are less than ten pages, some of them are only a few lines. Many of them […]
A Scanner Darkly (the Richard Linklater adaptation of a Philip K Dick Novel) is released in the US at the end of this week. Whilst looking around at lots of the reviews and previews online I found this article on slate.com. Joshua Glenn (who also writes an excellent column at the Boston Globe) has really […]
For those of you who are interested, the official “A Scanner Darkly” website is online here, looks good. Some stills:
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or […]