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| Albrecht Dürer ‘Three Studies of a Tree Bullfinch‘ 1543 watercolor, located at the Real Monasterio de El Escorial, El Escorial, Spain |
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| 'The Great Turf', 1503, watercolor, pen, and ink, Albertina, Vienna |
Nothing can alter the fact that almost all of the teeming painted worlds that Pisanello once created, from this multitude of observations, have long since vanished. The frescoes have disappeared, or the buildings that once housed them have burned down, fallen down, or been demolished. But to be drawn into his world even through its fragments – to witness the ruins, so to speak, of the Pisanello monument – is still to see and feel the reality of Renaissance court life with an immediacy and fullness that can be had in no other way. Although we will never be able to see him whole, we can at least recover some sense of the epic amplitude of his art – and begin to understand what Lodovico Gonzaga meant when he called Pisanello “the Homer of painting”.
andBut "I just want to be happy" is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug. Because once you say it, the implication is that you're not.
There are things that do make me experience joy. But joy is a fleeting emotion, like a very long sneeze. A lot of the time what I feel is, interested. Or I feel melancholy. And I also frequently feel tenderness, annoyance, confusion, fear, hopelessness. It doesn't all add up to anything I would call happiness. But what I'm thinking is, is that so terrible?
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| image from Paul Ekman, psychologist who pioneered studies of facial expression and emotion. |
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| Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513–14 Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528) Engraving 9 5/8 x 7 1/2 in. (24.4 x 19.1 cm) Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943 (43.106.2) |
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| Melencolia I, 1514 Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528) Engraving 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in. (24 x 18.5 cm) Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943 (43.106.1) |
"I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose. Which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell."
There's no more ridiculed genre in the literary canon – and you can see why. Most self-help books are written by Americans of the most sentimental and unctuous sort. They promise their readers eternal life, untold riches and an escape from every grubby aspect of being human, all within 300 pages of upbeat, relentlessly repetitive and patronising prose. No wonder the unstated assumption of the cultural elite is that really only stupid people read them.
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| photo from The School of Life |
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| via Rachel Comey's tumblr |
...there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success." The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.From What is Education For? by David W. Orr
Last week I read a piece in Forbes about how young people today should not complain about “underemployment,” the phenomenon of working part-time or at a job unsuited to one’s level of education. Instead, says the author, young people should be completely excited to work at minimum wage for an indefinite period of time, to take whatever they can get. The article, helpfully titled Get Over It!, restates, for those who have never heard the myth, that in America you just need to work hard and make your own luck, even if you are starting out with five or ten times as much debt as previous generations.And the authors of this crappy advice?
Their expertise and their insight have become completely obsolete. Rather than admit that they no longer possess relevant expertise and set themselves to being curious about the future, these writers are choosing to express advice from a bygone age, one in which they still possess authority. To do otherwise would be far too personally painful. And to a majority of their audience, which formed its ideology in an America than no longer exists, hearing the old myths repeated brings comfort. After all, in the America of the 20th Century, a solid work ethic and an education was enough to bring most people a career that would provide a lifestyle filled with the goods and services of the Middle Class. It was a good system, and it attracted the attention of the world. Who wouldn’t want to go back to that land, however mythical, in their mind?
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| from monty python's completely useless website |
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| from imdb |
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| illustration from "Outside Over There" |
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| from "No Fighting No Biting" by Else Homelund Minarik |
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn’t work out, you had your head cut off.
Polaroid inventor Edwin Land on embracing failure, among other insights on what it takes to innovate.Via Exp.lore.com.
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| Cockney? |
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| Or Latin? |
