Tag: culture
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Experience is of no practical value; it is merely the name we give to our mistakes
We’re curious creatures, we humans; in our Western society at least, it is a common conceit to think we are so unique that we’ve each taken a different route to end up where we are; we’ve followed unexpected detours, braved gravel roads that wound through thick, unnamed forests; got lost innumerable times until we found…
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The only hope for continued individualism is belonging
While I find myself immersed in a culture that values individualism, I am reminded of a quote from the famous polymath literary figure, Jean Cocteau, that ‘We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.’ There’s a lot to that. I have grown up in a society which treasures individualism, so I’m certainly not disputing a…
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I am the table
What is it about an organism that makes it a table setting for posterity, a book with no words, a classroom with no teacher? History is one thing; it has events, and usually documentary accounts and descriptions of its occurrence: a monument here, a written mention there. Evidence… But what about culture? How could the…
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Will this look of thine hurl my soul from heaven?
‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, wrote Yeats in his magnificent poem The Second Coming. That’s how I feel sometimes, when I think about the things I was taught and came to accept. Came to expect, because what we see is so often laden with expectations. We accept what our culture paints, so we are…
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I hold the world but as the world
I suppose very few things resist change; we filter most things through the eyes of our culture after all. But I, an admitted closet-pareidoliac[i], am still amazed at the variety of pattern-reading throughout the ages. What is it that changes the look of a painting, say -its feeling? How is it that the same person…
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The feast of languages
I’ve never been very good at foreign languages -perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated that some people can speak more than one with seeming ease. Some languages, I can recognize by the sound alone, although I don’t understand what is being said, for others I can make out a few words, although seldom the…
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You yourself shall keep the key of it
There are times when I wonder if my father straddled two worlds. He was a learned man, and his knowledge was no doubt hard-earned through books and teachers, but I discovered as a child that there was more to his knowledge than what he had stored in his head. “Answers are lying around everywhere, G,”…
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And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts
Don’t you think there is something magical about our senses? I mean, that something out there transmutes into something in here? And it doesn’t just enter our heads somehow, but becomes laden with meaning as well. Emotion. Rough becomes more than an irregular surface and suddenly acquires warmth and texture -even emotion perhaps- if it…
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