I’m currently reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. When talking about how Proust helps to expand the world around us by pointing out the things we tend to miss, he writes the following:
An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that [...]
Part of my motive for getting involved in the smallholding was to understand, and gain some experience of, the process in which animals are reared and processed to produce the steak or joint in the butchers. With this in mind, we recently took the pigs to slaughter at a local abattoir.
I wasn’t really sure how emotional this was [...]
As well as helping out on the smallholding, I have decided to keep a couple of chickens of my own in the back garden. The most satisfying outcome of this decision so far has been the construction of their run. I employed the help of a carpenter friend and we managed to create a pretty fantastic chicken house, working from [...]
I wrote a little while ago about how I felt I was maturing in the aesthetic, this growth is coming to a head now, everything around me has taken on a slightly different colour, a slightly different façade. For example, over the summer I have developed a broader range of things which I see as valuable, and [...]
I’ve been learning about the brain over the last few days and it has helped me re-realise the magnificent complexity of the human body and the ethical issues surrounding scientific progress. Resources have been piled into brain research over the past 100 years or so, yet we are still totally clueless about how most of the [...]
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 [...]
Check out this amazing video from photographer Gregory Colbert. There's also a full length version of the film available on DVD, although it's quite hard to come by. It makes up part of an entire Ashes and Snow project, made up of films, installations, photographs and novels, you can find out more about it here.
"In [...]