The advantage to society of energetic intellectual activity is that it offers society self-awareness, wakefulness and clarity, inspiration and new ideas, and intelligence in debate and action. A sluggard community which never asks questions or inspects the world around it with a bright eye, and which never tries out different ways of understanding its circumstances, [...]
Posts under ‘Seen/Heard/Read’
"Why clever people believe stupid things"
Talking about backmasking, about the Freemasons, about conspiracy theories, about puddles of water, about intelligence, about the media, about hoaxes, about intentions, about politics, about assumptions…
As human beings, we have an innate ability to make something out of nothing. We see shapes in the clouds, and a man in the moon; we take a perfectly [...]
Riveries
For most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised… It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood, or a dream entertained as we drive along a motorway and feel our plans hovering above the horizon. Extraordinary resilience, intelligence and good fortune are needed to redraw the [...]
Woods
She looked up from the book and said, ‘What?’ and I said it again: ‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’
She pursed her lips. ‘It’s like the words I just read, isn’t it? It makes you feel something and you don’t know what it is.’
~ Walter Tevis, Mockingbird
Biodiversity volunteering and participatory monitoring
Excerpt from Lawrence, A. (2005) Reluctant citizens? The disjuncture between participatory biological monitoring and participatory environmental governance. Paper presented at the International Sociology Conference “Environment, Knowledge and Democracy” 6-7 July 2005. Faculte des Sciences de Luminy, Marseilles. Full paper available here.
On the one hand, participants are longing for the opportunity, indeed the ‘excuse’, to observe [...]
Without anguish
Nemo altero fragilior est: nemo in crastinam sui certior.
[No man is frailer than another: no man more certain of the morrow.]
The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived [...]
On educating children
Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’. He, whose [...]
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive [...]
To judge a man
Why do you judge a man when he is all wrapped up like a parcel? He is only letting us see only such attributes as do not belong to him while hiding the only ones which enable us to judge his real worth… You must judge him not by his finery but by his own [...]
Flight
Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places, they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.
~ Geoff Dyer
