Even the Sun Will Die

When Eckhart Tolle agreed to be interviewed on September 11, 2001, he could not foresee the historic nature of this date or the suffering that would follow. As the day’s events unfolded, in real time, he responded with a calm and clear voice, helping to make sense out of the fear and chaos that will forever define this date.

We live in a time, he says, when we define ourselves through our enemies; and science and technology are in the service of human madness.

Even the Sun Will Die - a wonderful interview with Eckhart Tolle. Can be previewed / downloaded from here.

Mumbai, Terror, Making Sense

Can we ever make sense of madness?

Can whatever it is that we label 'making sense' change anything?

Is sense non-stop news with live updates of horror in the making? (this morning the media was covering the funeral rites of Hemant Karkare & Sandeep Unnikrishnan in great detail. Is this making sense?)

Sometimes words must stop, digital eyes must stay averted, precious life must be protected, precious life must be respected.

From James Wood's piece on Naipaul, Wounder and Wounded:

“If you want to write serious books,” he said to me, “you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. Is it true that Anita Brookner writes exactly the same novel every year?” It is true, I said. “How awful, how awful.”

Resonated so well with me. I enjoy Brookner whose books are fine variations on the same theme. Yet, you know, very same theme.

Delighted to locate and post this Hugh Padgham video interview. Note to self: Must watch, must listen.

Oh and oh, here's an interview with Neil Dorfsman. Must be my lucky day!

I told him how all my life I had been making houses for myself - in a corner of the attic in my parents' house in Missouri, in clearings among lodgepole pines in the Adams foothills, in offices I shared with other teachers. My nesting and my neatening were compulsions in me that Theron looked on as plebeian, anti-intellectual, lace-curtain Irish; he said I wanted to spend my life in a tub of warm water, forswearing adventure but, worse, forswearing commitment. My pride of house was the sin of pride.

-Jean Stafford, An Influx of Poets, a story (extract of an autobiographical novel?)

The relations between parents and children today have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. He expected a certain standard of behaviour, even, of ceremony, in family life. Yet if freedom means the right to think one's own thoughts and to follow one's own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did.

-Virginia Woolf, A Daughter's Memories (1932), collected in The Platform of Time

The Golden Notebook Project - went live yesterday. Good time to start following the conversation (via). You can read along online.

Walter Benjamin on Flickr

That is how I got to this page. And then here. And here. Also here. Wanting to reread the essay Unpacking my Library, I searched for Walter Benjamin and ended up spending (still) quite a while looking at photos of books. You know what's funny to me - I had never looked for book pools on Flickr. Odd, really odd, considering I search for bookshelves and desks and so on.

Heartwarming

Both the pictures and what the election gone by might mean for Americans and everyone else (via)