We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…
~ Madeleine L’Engle
October 2009
Mamihlapinatapai →
en.wikipedia.org
Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.” (via Martin)
The Nickert
A. Kuhn and W. Schwartz, North German Legends, Tales, and Customs
Thanks to cabinetdesdrruthven
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
~ Anais Nin
“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”
—Edward R. Murrow (via blogut)
“
When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’
It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?
” —Sandi Toksvig lists ten unsung heroines, from the inventor of the cotton gin to a queen who led her troops into battle wearing an iron leg - the world’s first known use of a prosthesis. (via bingoparaphernalia) (via gauntlet) (via robot-heart) (via theantidote)
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound (via myserendipities)
“The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”
—Albert Eistein (via lastchatwithphontaine)
“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
John Green (Paper Towns)
“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”
—Peter Ustinov (via blogut)
“I’m glad to say I haven’t found my style yet. I’d be bored to death.”
—Edgar Degas, Degas: An Intimate Portrait by Ambroise Vollard (1927) (via blogut)
For all eternity...
Eternity, that old Egyptian cat,
Is coiling in the corner for the moment,
Serene and calm, apparently off guard.
But in a whim, all might forever change,
A magic lamp of Chinese porcelain
Gets broken and the little spot of light
Is yielded to the memory, until
It also fades and darkness fills its place.
A swarm of dreams, a meshwork of suggestions
Is suddenly eternally promoted
To wishful thinking. Wait… what is “eternal”?
A handful dozen years, and then one day
They’ll find your breathless - shall we call it “body”?.. -
Whatever you have left as parting gift
For others, who, with grief or with relief,
Will take the care of putting it away,
For all eternity.
And what of you?
What of that point, from which you could behold
The skies, and plants, and planets, and the people?..
The orphan web of messages in words
And dreams, reflecting light which is no more,
Is no good answer. Where could have you gone?
Eternally unknown. As they say,
When Universe gets tired of work and play,
We’ll see each other at the other side
Of starry sky.
It’s not to verify
For all eternity.
But hope remains.
Good-bye.
Зима, Москва, ГЗ за кованой оградой, трамвай сквозь полумрак плывёт по снегопаду, сияющее прошлое, мерцают во мгле слова, - а бабочка на подошве, наверно, ещё жива.
“The advent of instantaneous brain-to-brain communication, while inferior to the word in its ability to communicate intricate meaning, may one day emerge as superior in terms of simply relaying information quickly. The notion that the written word and the complex system of grammatical and cultural rules governing its use would retain its viability in an era where thinking, talking, and accessing the world’s storehouse of information are indistinguishable seems uncertain at best.”
—The Futurist: The Dawn of the Postliterate Age, page 2 (via wildcat2030)
“Jean-Paul Sartre declared that the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a person is the ability to say “no.” To keep silent even in the face of torture or death is humanity’s most powerful, final act of will. What if that ability were to be lost? What if that final freedom is taken away and information can be taken from a person despite their act of resistance? Something precious will have been lost to the human condition because our inner lives will no longer be ours alone”
—Is My Mind Mine? - Forbes.com (via wildcat2030)
