|
|
 |
|
|
Get A Life
|
 |
|
|
|
The sole cause of man`s unhappiness?
On happiness?
One little hope?
on and on and on?
What is art?
The problem with sleeping with fish?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The easy lures of civilization!
Alain de Boton on advertising...
Karl Marx. The ruling ideas of every age.
On the question of courage
The importance of an artistic experience...
Art does not fake reality
More lives than one?
What have we learned?
Every childhood.....
The sole cause of man`s unhappiness?
Pascal said:
The sole cause of man`s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quitely in his room!
On happiness?
Found this inscription etched on a tile attached to the local library:
A false reality that makes you happy is worth any truth that drags you to the ground!
Dont know who said that but its got great humorous insight.
One little hope?
A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope. Charles Schultz
on and on and on?
Quirky quote...but what does it mean?
On, and on, and on...the ocean-broad on-ingness of the littleness, in the pudding of the everyday.
What is art?
Someone said...
Art is not optional.
It is the umbilical chord that connects us with the divine.
Its what makes us human!
The problem with sleeping with fish?
For the answer...
See a childs engraved ceramic tile image.
Click on Things To Do...Anyone for fishing? On this site.
Very amusing...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The easy lures of civilization!
Rousseau said that however independent minded we might judge ourselves to be, we are dangerously poor at understanding our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be satisfied, or when they do mumble something, their commands are likely to be misfounded or contradictory.
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and can distract us from the careful, arduous task of correctly tracing our priorities.
He describes technological pre-history where people led a simpler satisfied life. Where people more easily understood themselves and were drawn towards essential features of a satisfied life: a love of family, a respect for nature, an awe at the beauty of the universe, a curiosity about others, and a taste for music and simple entertainments. It is from this state that commercial “civilisation” has pulled us, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.
Like the Indians of North America, who gave up a simple life for the trinkets that came with European trade…these thousands of things, ardently sought, didn’t appear to make the Indians any happier. Certainly they worked harder. The Indians, no different in their psychological make-up from other humans, succumbed to the easy lures of the trinkets of modern civilization and ceased listening to the quiet voices that spoke of the modest pleasures of the community and the beauty of the empty canyons at dusk.
Alain de Boton
Alain de Boton on advertising...
Advertising fails to mention that we have a tendency to cease appreciating anything after owning it for a short while. The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it – just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry them! We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will guarantee us an enduring satisfaction.
We forget that after reaching the summit we will be called down again into the fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire with another. Advertising also stays silent on the weak capacity of all material goods to alter our levels of happiness, as compared with the overwhelming power of emotional events. The most elegant and accomplished vehicle (for example) cannot bring us a fraction of the satisfaction of a relationship ...just as it cannot be any comfort whatever following a domestic argument or abandonment.
If we cannot stop envying, it is especially poignant that we should envy the wrong things.
Karl Marx. The ruling ideas of every age.
Marx said: The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.
Dominant ideas in Marxs words are ideological. An ideological statement being defined as one that subtly pushes a partial line while pretending to be speaking neutrally.
Ideology is released into society like colourless and odourless gas. It is embodied in newspapers, advertisements, television programmes and textbooks.
Unless our political senses are developed we will fail to spot these things. They appear to be givens in a society.
Ideology wears a smile and lies in innocent places, within the bric-a-brac of what we read and hear. Yet it retains an equally partial and sometimes prejudiced conception of how a good life should be led.
Ideology needs to be de-naturalised and diffused through analysis. This cannot prevent problems, bat at the very least it can teach us a host of useful things about the best ways to approach them, sharply diminishing a sense of persecution, passivity and confusion.
Alain de Boton
On the question of courage
Life expands in direct proportion to one`s courage
The importance of an artistic experience...
...is not what man learns from it, but that he experiences it.
Art does not fake reality
...it stylizes it.
More lives than one?
``For all the woe that moved him so
None knew so well as I
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die``
What have we learned?
I have learned that:
...miracles look best fully clothed.
...that the ocean does not fake her orgasm.
...that cherry is the most popular flavour of edible underpants.
...that the best way to see is not to look.
...that god is a conspiracy theory.
...not to eat garlic with Chardonnay.
...not to wrap my dark secrets in cellophane.
...the value of walking on bubblewrap.
...to look for the one painting in the gallery that talks about the others.
...more from the needle than the chainsaw.
...that learning is worth more than knowing.
...that the revolution will have no fanfare but it will have sponsors!
Poetica. 30 Jesuses. Picaro Press
Every childhood.....
Every childhood, even the most hellish, contains a kernel of paradise small enough to slip into a trouser pocket like a handkerchief.
Some use it to wipe away their tears. Others to preserve scents and perfumes, or like squirrels they hoard their meagre treasures.
Quote from book about Pierre Bonnard artist. "Forever nude"
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
