the way around is through

When we want to go into the universe, we can't look at a rock like the Japanese. We have to actually go to the moon. We are so literal ... We have devices, sensors, alpha conditioning machines. The machines are just manifested thought. Technology isn't anything outside us ... We just go about it very clumsily and very wastefully. Because we have to actually make all these devices, we have to go to the moon, we can't see the cosmos in a rock, and we can't meditate without having this thing strapped on us.

james turrell, in james turrell: a retrospective

previously.

accumulated time

Setting up residence in a one-room Siberian hut is a victory in the battle against being buried alive by objects. Life in the woods melts the fat away. Unburdened, the airship of life sails higher. Two thousand years ago, the Indo-Sarmatian steppe nomads knew enough to transport their possessions in a small wooden coffer. One's attachment to belongings is in direct proportion to their rarity, and to a Siberian woodsman, a knife and a gun are as precious as any flesh-and-blood companion. An object that has been with us through the ups and downs of life takes on substance and a special aura; the years give it a protective patina. To learn to love each one of our poor patrimony of objects, we have to spend a long time with them. Soon the loving looks directed at the knife, the teapot and the lamp come to embrace their materials and elements: the wood of the spoon, the candle's wax, the flame itself. As the nature of objects reveals itself, I seem to pierce the mysteries of their essence. I love you, bottle; I love you, little jackknife, and you wooden pencil, and you, my cup, and you, teapot steaming away like a ship in distress.

sylvain tesson, the consolations of the forest.

what to read and why

... it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

franz kafka to oskar pollak (27.1.1904)

more than enough

the life of affluence and pleasure requires exact discipline and high imagination.

alan watts, does it matter?