Una Eternidad Más Grande Que Otras

The art of reading is in many ways opposed to the art of writing. Read- ing is a craft that enriches the text conceived by the author, deepening it and rendering it more complex, concentrating it to reflect the reader’s personal experience and expanding it to reach the farthest confines of the reader’s uni- verse and beyond. Writing, instead, is the art of resignation. The writer must accept the fact that the final text will be but a blurred reflection of the work conceived in the mind, less enlightening, less subtle, less poignant, less pre- cise. The imagination of a writer is all-powerful, and capable of dreaming up the most extraordinary creations in all their wishful perfection. Then comes the descent into language, and in the passage from thought to expres- sion much—very much—is lost. To this rule there are hardly any exceptions. To write a book is to resign oneself to failure, however honorable that failure might be.

Alberto Manguel 'Curiosity'

What characterizes an epoch need not therefore necessarily be 'new' in the sense of appearing for the first time. Epochal signification may very well be connected with famous figures who are only now being moved into the centre of the historical stage.

N. Luhmann Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman

Kurt Vonnegut’s classic lecture on the shapes of stories, now in an infographic. 

Amazing Photos of Trees Frozen in Subzero Temperatures Pinar, mymodernmet.com

Snow is noth­ing new to win­try weath­er but Monza, Italy-based pho­tog­ra­ph­er Niccoló Bon­fa­di­ni cap­tures a unique sight of the sea­son in which trees are com­plete­ly over­whelmed by snow and ice in sub­ze­ro tem­per­a­tures. The cloud-like…

Niccoló Bonfandini va a Finlandia

Belleza... y algo más.

Incommunicability, it would seem, was invented [in the eighteenth century] in order to take the banality out of mediocrity. It was incommunicability that enabled normal people in the literature at hand to come up with a story which others could find interesting.

Luhman Love as Passion

Sólo soñar...

Ferronautas en México

What I want to do today is to consider what is involved when we seek to understand our own and others' lives backwards, reflecting on earlier thoughts, feelings and emotions, and responding emotionally to them. The idea I want to put forward is that everyday explanation of what we think, feel, and do is narrative in form, presenting what happened from a possible multiplicity of perspectives: not just the perspectives of those involved in what happened, but also the perspective of the narrator—the person who is giving the explanation. Seeing our everyday explanations in this light enables us also to see how emotional responses to value can be recognised in this potential multiplicity of perspectives. Things swim in emotions. In this respect, everyday explanation is extremely close to fictional narrative, and this is because they are both species of the same genus—the genus story.

Goldie, P., Narrative and perspective