To Imagine...
To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.
—Henry Miller, Third or Forth Day of Spring
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Eiffel Tower Photographs
Photographs of the Eiffel Tower by Magnum photographers.
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James Ravilious
A world in photographs video, article and a selection of photographs. Thanks to Mike Johnston for calling my attention to this. Do stop by The Online Photographer if you have never visited before!
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Childlike
And when one day one perceives that their occupations are paltry, their professions petrified and no longer linked with living, why not then continue to look like a child upon it all as upon something unfamiliar, from out of the depth of one’s own world, out of the expanse of one’s own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation?
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Small is Beautiful
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.
See also:
- The book in PDF form (960kb PDF file)
- Local Currencies: Catalysts for Sustainable Regional Economies
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FIB: Cats on Other Cats
Anyone who lives around heaps of cats can’t help but to notice a certain passing into a certain season. The males get restless, they pace, they fight, they howl while the females sit calmly waiting on the side-lines, waiting for the victor to take them by the neck. “The poor cats,” I think. I want to sterilize every last one of them. I want this instinctual insanity to stop, not because the idea bothers me, but because there is a fatality in the sure-shot objective to mate and mate and mate. Though it is life-giving to an extensive extent, the masses of kittens go forgotten and this ferocious objective to make life is so quickly spent. The cycle of birth-mate-birth-mate-birth-death hungrily feeds itself. To what end? To what point?
I guess I’ve stumbled upon the original grotesque.
When I was younger and content with my barn full of cats, this “certain” season passed me ignorantly by. I didn’t even notice it, until Voila! One hundred more kittens! What a great season that was. Some days, after climbing the straight and rickety wooden ladder, I would find one or two petrified, like a little kitten rock—but that was all part of what was an obvious, not obvious, but necessary cycle, as I saw it at the time. My brothers threw these little kitten rocks out the window, while I would bend on my knee and bury them in the freshly tilled dirt.
The other day, both times I left my cozy house and went into the grey-white air crisply blowing, there was the tell-tale sign of this “certain” season, namely, cat on cat. The second time it was in the doorway of a moderately busy street and the teenage girls who were also passing fell into a fit of giggles and joked to each other about taking a photo.
Brinquedo is yowling. The whole house out in the piazza is barking. Life must be the ferocious begetter of life.
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Overheard, Monday, 2 February 2009
In the Norcino di Bracciano, where you can buy fresh pork:
“Senza vino non se magna!”
“Without wine one can’t eat!”
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Mirrors of the Bush Presidency
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FIB: RIP: Besouro (or Little B)
Paola says it’s the sweet cats that always die. Die, because they are too trusting, too sweet. Perhaps Little B’s legs just couldn’t carry him fast enough away. He was a corpse full of blood, on the inside, when I found him. We think a dog bit into him and shook the life out of him. I found him below our window. And though the night was strange, not strange enough to warrant looking out the window and seeing a dead cat, let alone a cat that was loved. Poor little Besouro! And though spring is coming and the piazza will again teem with sun and kittens, it is losing what you were close to that is hard. Dead animals are dead animals, like dead bits of grass laid brown over the cold earth. I’ve seen many a dead animals in my day, but death still shocks. And maybe, as I get older, it shocks even more. Dust to dust and earth to earth. We put him in the ground where the roots will crawl through his skull, where he will become flowering bushes or flowers or grass or thorny weeds, and that is a comfort to me.
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Inauguration Photographs
A great selection, and check out young Barry Obama!
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