We all should have a reading nook in which to snuggle down and escape into a book.
TheMindCircle.com has some excellent examples, here.
Images: TheMindCircle.com
Downtime
Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it. Let the rest of your days be spent as one who has wholeheartedly committed his all to the gods, and is thenceforth no man’s master or slave.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (4.31)
I could retreat here.
The Contemporist.com highlights this writer’s studio that’s also home to a 1,700 volume poetry library, designed by architect Eric J. Smith.
Photography by Durston Saylo | Design: Eric J. Smith Architect
I’ve just finished The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray. It opens…
We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant.”
If you struggle to find a logic to follow in identity politics, if you’re somewhat mystified by the raging debates about gender versus sex, or the rights of actors or writers to present a perspective other than that of their own race-gender-sexuality, then this is the book for you.
As a result, I too found myself googling “European art” and “straight white couple”. I’ve so far resisted the temptation to google Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda video … but, the days are longer in self-isolation.
A valuable, insightful book.
There’s a taster in this interview from Uncommon Knowledge:
Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash
Leave another’s wrongdoing where it lies.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (9.20)
…you are your contribution.
Sage advice on redundancy from Nicholas Bate.
Photo by Muhammad Raufan Yusup on Unsplash
All the things that fortune favours become fruitful and pleasant only if those who possess them are also in possession of themselves and not in the power of heir property. It is a mistake to judge fortune responsible for anything that is good or bad for us. Fortune merely gives us the material for good and bad things—the preliminaries for what will turn out to be either good or bad within us.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (98.2)
For the stone thrown there is no more evil in falling than there is goods in rising.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (9.17)
All life is at Cultural Offering, including…
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.
Clive James
and…
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
Frédéric Chopin
Among the many gems I’ve gathered from Kurt is the Frank Sinatra album, In The Wee Small Hours.
I discovered only yesterday that the cover of Tom Waits’ The Heart of Saturday Night was based on the sleeve of the Sinatra album.
Image: Kurt Harden.
Dip into these insights and reminders from Nicholas Bate…
Play more music, more often. It can only make you feel better.
The deepest thinking coincides with the most brisk of walking. Rain or shine.
Whatever you do, do it well. You feel good and you become indispensable.