frantumaglia

frantumaglia

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The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.”

The Bookish Life, Joseph Epstein

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The pizza effect is a term used especially in religious studies and sociology for the phenomenon of elements of a nation or people's culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported back to their culture of origin, or the way in which a community's self-understanding is influenced by (or imposed by, or imported from) foreign sources

Pizza effect

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and there's also part 2

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1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. 3. Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. 4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. 5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. 6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. 7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. 8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. 9. Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. 10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Ten guidelines for nurturing a thriving democracy by Bertrand Russell

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When you don’t fully understand a person’s context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it’s easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person’s behavior.

Laziness Does Not Exist

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1. Be patient. No matter what. 2. Don't badmouth: Assign responsibility, never blame. Say nothing behind another's back you'd be unwilling to say, in exactly the same tone and language, to his face. 3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. 4. Expand your sense of the possible. 5. Don't trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change. 6. Expect no more of anyone than you yourself can deliver. 7. Tolerate ambiguity. 8. Laugh at yourself frequently. 9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than whom is right. 10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong. 11. Give up blood sports. 12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Do not endanger it frivolously. And never endanger the life of another. 13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. 14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them. 15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that. 16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun. 17. Praise at least as often as you disparage. 18. Never let your errors pass without admission. 19. Become less suspicious of joy. 20. Understand humility. 21 Forgive. 22. Foster dignity. 23. Live memorably. 24. Love yourself. 25. Endure.

John Perry Barlow, Principles of adult behaviour

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John Salvatier:

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

"I know that I know nothing", meaning: the less we know about something, the less aware we are of its complexity.

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ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea, possibly sampled by the standardized methods described in ISO 1839. It was originally laid down in 1980 as BS 6008:1980 by the British Standards Institution.[1] It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea).

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“Freedom is the possibility of isolation,” he writes in the final entry. “If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave.”

The New Yorker, Fernando Pessoa's Disappearing Act

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Many fences of South London's housing estates are former stretchers used in the Second World War. From the Stretcher Railing Society:

These stretchers were originally made so that Air Raid Protection officers could carry injured people during bombing attacks in the Blitz. Over 600,000 stretchers were built from steel to enable them to be easily disinfected in highly-feared gas attacks. When the war ended there was a large surplus of stretchers and many of London's housing estates had had their original railings removed to serve the war effort.

The council wants to remove them.

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The Secret Life of the City Banana

Millions of bananas arrive every week in New York City. It takes a lot to get them from the boat to the bodega.

This is my usual recurring reminder that WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT OF BANANAS.

Did you know that the banana we eat today (the Cavendish) became popular because the banana we used to eat in the past (the Gros Michel) was rendered commercially exinct due to the 'Panama disease', which causes the banana trees to rot from the inside:

The breed chosen by the industry to replace it, the Cavendish, was resistant to that particular strain of Panama Disease, but it wasn’t as sturdy as the Gros Michel. It transformed the industry into the one we know today, Mr. Koeppel said, requiring boxes, refrigeration and advanced ripening technology.

Today, almost all export bananas in the world are Cavendish. Chosen more for its disease resistance, it is not necessarily the most flavorful variety, according to Mr. Koeppel. He called it the McDonald’s of bananas. In India, where there are hundreds of banana breeds, the Cavendish is known as the hotel banana.

And the problem is — it's happening again:

The Cavendish is susceptible to a new strain of Panama Disease known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4. The Cavendish is essentially a clone, and while genetically identical bananas that look and act alike are good for business, Mr. Koeppel said, “when one gets sick, they all get sick.

“There is no question that the Cavendish banana is going to be severely stricken by Panama Disease,” Mr. Koeppel said. “There are reputable plant pathologists saying this, not just banana-loving journalists.”

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Loneliness is absolute. Anything else is an illusion. Never expect anything but trouble. If something nice happens, all the better. Just don't imagine you can do away with loneliness. A sense of togetherness can be created in, say, religion, politics, love, art. But loneliness is still all-encompassing. The treacherous part is that every once in a while you're struck by an illusion of togetherness. Just remember that it is an illusion. That makes it easier when everything returns to normal.

Scenes From a Marriage, Bergman

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Bergman associates a lack of love with a loss of meaning. When we are loveless, the world appears to us as dull and deformed; when our love is unrequited, it mutates into spite and contempt. For Bergman, love is a form of protective care, a balm that soothes and sustains. Love involves a partial abandonment of the self: the greatest privilege is “to be allowed to live for someone else”, in the words of Tomas’ longsuffering parishioner. [...]  Bergman once remarked that death is “a very, very wise arrangement” – it offers a bookend to our lives, which we can infuse with meaning through love. There is suffering in the world, and we must try to comprehend it, even in its senselessness, but above all we must seek to mitigate it with mercy and generosity. Bergman would like us to remember Agnes’s diary entry: “I have received the best gift anyone could have in this life. The gift has many names: affinity, fellowship, human contact, affection. I believe this is what is called grace”.

The ‘greatest film-maker who ever lived’, BBC