An insider's view

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,
since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

                George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred and healing

A shaman, according to Claude Levi-Stauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena – something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.

                Alvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Shakespeare never used the word “ping” and neither should you

When you say
ping me
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
Bio break, too.
It makes me cringe.
And if I am being honest
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what net-net means unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items
and honestly I don’t care
if this won’t scale
and may I add that
going forward I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.

        John Kenney, Love Poems for Anxious People

 

 

 

 

 

 

A state of grace

Age has no reality except in the physical world.
The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.
Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits
remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,
but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

            Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

 

 

 

 

Priorities

You have to get your priorities right.
Women are around all the time
but World Cups come only once every four years.

        Peter Osgood, English footballer
        quoted in A Commonplace Book: British Heritage Travel

 

 

 

 

 

If in doubt, assume life

You may discover someone apparently dead,
and it can be difficult to tell whether he is really dead or not….
If there is any doubt whether someone is dead, treat him as being alive.

What to Do When Someone Dies
British Consumers Association book 1967
quoted in Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Longing for Utopia

A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out
the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

        Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism