Ruminations

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2013

Quote Of The Week

"The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers."

Happy Holidaze

Quote Of The Week

"But since death is inevitable we don’t have to deal with it (it’ll deal with us when it decides to). What we do have to deal with is the psychic, physical, and fusion diseases wrought during our so-called lives as byproducts of the elemental clash. In other words we’re all terminally psychotic and no doctor, hospital, pill, needle, book or guru holds the cure. Because the disease is called life and there is no cure for that but death and death’s just part of the set-up designed to keep you terrified and thus in bondage from the cradle to the crypt so ha ha the joke’s on you except there’s no punchline and the comedian forgot you ever existed as even a comma."

Life Itself Is An Exile

Colin Wilson

Rest In Peace

"“The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the

world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with

oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual

illumination of one's own potentialities."

Occupy The World

"History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme."

From The Cure At Troy, 1991

Quote Of The Week

"The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things."

Goodnight Madiba

Nelson Mandela

Rest In Peace

"Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity."

Quote Of The Week

"Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."

L'argent Et Les Mots

André Schiffrin

Rest In Peace

Fare thee well to the great André Schiffrin, who published and championed the likes of Günter Grass, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, Michel Foucault and Art Spiegelman, among countless others via Pantheon Books which he ran until 1990, after which he co-founded nonprofit publishing house The New Press. He was also one of the founders of The Student League For Industrial Democracy (later known as the Students For A Democratic Society), and while studying at Clare College Cambridge served as editor of Granta. Schiffrin died in Paris on Sunday; he was 78.

The Pursuit Of Happiness

“They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.”