Wake me the hell up.

An essential Murray principle: Wear your wisdom lightly, so insights arrive as punch lines. When pressed about his interactions with the public, he admits that the encounters are, to a certain extent, "selfish." Murray shifts his weight on the couch and explains, "My hope, always, is that it's going to wake me up. I'm only connected for seconds, minutes a day, sometimes. And suddenly, you go, ‘Holy cow, I've been asleep for two days. I've been doing things, but I'm just out.' If I see someone who's out cold on their feet, I'm going to try to wake that person up. It's what I'd want someone to do for me. Wake me the hell up and come back to the planet."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/being-bill-murray-20141028#ixzz3IhvbhgPx
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From the Lost Writings of Wu Hsin

Do not deem

Wu Hsin to be insane

Simply because you cannot hear

The music he dances to.

Man is the one who is insane:

His solution to his

Need for security is to

Lock himself away in a prison.

What could be more secure than

A prison?

He passes his time

In a solitary cell labeled “me”.

Believing he is now safe and that

No other can harm him,

He has exchanged freedom

For security.

What is outside

The walls of the prison is the unknown,

Possibly not secure,

Not safe,

Alien, at times hostile, and

Not at all predictable.

Yet what sane man would choose

Prison over freedom?

Man is the one who is insane:

He trades the experience of life,

Here and now,

For time and attention spent

On regretting the past,

Wishing for a better past and

Hoping for a brighter future,

For a future that will right

What is now deemed not right.The laughter of a child,

The blueness of the sky,

All sacrificed on the altar of

Mental preoccupations.

What a waste!

Man is the one who is insane:

Yet, quite normal

Within societal boundaries.

Numerous methods may lead one to

Being more comfortable.

But that is all you get:

One who is more comfortable in their prison,

Not one freed from their prison.

Nothing gets a person out of their prison

Because the person is the prison.

These words are not directed to

Any individual,

Any personality,

Any you.

Instead they go to that

Which supports the “you”,

Sustains the “you”,

Yet is prior to it.

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” 

— Anton Chekhov

There are mighty old trees among us whose demise is owed to the velocity of attention paid to the ever sprouting new, novel, trendy....their voices require attention and silence to perceive and time to digest.

Mighty Old Trees Are Perishing Fast

“It’s a worldwide problem and appears to be happening in most types of forest,” said the study’s lead author, David Lindemayer, a professor at Australian National University and an expert in landscape ecology and forest management. The research team found that big, old trees are dying at an alarmingly fast clip around the world at all latitudes – Yosemite National Park in California, the African savanna, the Brazilian rain forest, Europe and the boreal forests around the world. […]

The die-off of these 100-to-300-year-old trees raises concern, the researchers say, because they sustain biodiversity to a greater degree than many other components of the forest. “Big, old trees are not just enlarged young trees,” said Jerry F. Franklin of the University of Washington, a co-author of the study who has studied old-growth forest for 45 years. “Old trees have idiosyncratic features – a different canopy, different branch systems, a lot of cavities, thicker bark and more heartwood. They provide a lot more habitat and niches.”

Big trees also supply abundant food for numerous animals in the form of fruits, flowers, foliage and nectar, noted Bill Laurance, another co-author, from James Cook University in Australia. “Their hollows offer nests and shelter for birds and animals” and “their loss could mean extinction for such creatures,” he said. […]

The study is only the latest among many reports of how climate change and other factors are taking a severe toll on the world’s forests. British Columbia, for example, is ground zero for a giant forest die-off that is occurring across the Rockies. More than 53,000 square miles of forest there has died in the last decade. The largest previous die-off, in the 1980s, spanned 2,300 square miles. […]

A new fungal disease that is attacking Britain’s beloved ash trees has been front-page news there. It is feared that the fungus could claim more than 90 percent of Britain’s ash, as it has elsewhere in Europe.

Anita Brookner

10 Quotes

Nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. 

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Brookner is an English novelist and art historian. She won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac.

"The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak warm coffee a really superior sort of ice."

G.K. Chesterton. Quote of the Day « The Gentlemen’s Society for the Advancement of Mental Cultivation, Erudition, and Letters.

"The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate. In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”.

Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.

"

—

BBC NEWS | Africa | Congo word ‘most untranslatable’

(via rhea137)

Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. 

― Alejandra Pizarnik

Given the season with its widening days and lengthening dusk, ever gradual but insistent thawing, you would think there be little reason for melancholy.  But as the poet above hints, it is a disjointedness, an out of rhythm that quite easily occurs when the earth itself changes rhythm.  Especially when, like now, it seems hardly to have made up its mind which way it is going.  

That is only an illusion, of course, because we know which way it is going.  Like death and taxes, the turning of the seasons is inevitable.  We can count on it.  A firm foundation of trust exists between us and this phenomenon.

So we must make our hearts as well.  Allow for their seasons, and the disjointed moments when we are out of sync with our surroundings. To trust that we will return.  Because we can.  And we do.

 

"Fishin' With Duane" as told by Butch Trucks

Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

to stay in one's own place;

to stand for the constant presence of process

and to always seem the same;

to be steady as a rock and always trembling,

having the hard appearance of death

with the soft fluent nature of growth,

One's Being deceptively armored,

One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;

To be so tough, and to take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things of heaven and earth

For which we should otherwise have no word -----

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather than exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night and day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath

And perilous also--though there has never been

A critical tree---about the nature of things.

Howard Nemerov

Twigs (excerpt)

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end…

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

–Taha Muhammad Ali (From So What:  New and Selected Poems, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety--Alan Watts

““But in practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words. As a consequence, we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.”

“But there can be no sanity unless the difference between these two worlds is recognized. The scope and purposes of science are woefully misunderstood when the universe which it describes is confused with the universe in which man lives. Science is talking about a symbol of the real universe. It is a convenient time saver for making practical arrangements. But when money and wealth, reality and science are confused, the symbol becomes a burden.”

“Similarly, the universe described in formal, dogmatic religion is nothing more than a symbol of the real world, being likewise constructed out of verbal and conventional distinctions. To separate “this person” from the rest of the universe is to make a conventional separation. To want “this person” to be eternal is to want the words to be the reality, and to insist that a convention endure for ever and ever. We hunger for the perpetuity of something which never existed. Science has “destroyed” the religious symbol of the world because, when symbols are confused with reality, different ways of symbolizing reality will seem contradictory.”

“The scientific way of symbolizing the world is more suited to utilitarian purposes than the religious way, but this does not mean that it has any more “truth.” Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality. And because religion was being misused as a means for actually grasping and possessing the mystery of life, a certain measure of “debunking” was highly necessary.””

Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (via kenobi-wan-obi)(via catherinewillis)

 Source: kenobi-wan-obi