God Beauty Perfection Love :: Synonyms
To a practitioner of Tendai (Buddhism), everything is wonderful. ~ Saiko
The Fever One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep — Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning […]
Who are you? Are you the sum of your experiences, your actions, your memories? Are you your dreams, your plans, your aspirations, the person you’ll someday become? Are you your past, or your destiny or your present? The best films in any genre are always the ones that touch on […]
In 1974, Robert M. Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an extraordinary book about an extraordinary journey. The bit about touring around the U.S.A. on a motorcyle is good too. This novel captivated me in my early 20s. The mystical philosophy of ‘goodness’ Pirsig explores fascinates me. […]
Blade Runner is among my favourite films. In a veritable symphony of cinematic elements — cinematography, script, production design, soundtrack, direction, acting — it doesn’t miss a note. The film touches on all the major themes of the human condition: love, death, good and evil, redemption, justice, ethics, greed, passion. […]
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’ve got the film paused, just after the scene in which the verdict is handed down. Guilty. Both the film and the book resonate very deeply with me, in all the themes they touch […]
A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare. ~ Gregory David Roberts Shantaram
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the […]
While we’re still fresh with images of butterflies… ‘How does one become a butterfly?’ she asked pensively. ‘You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.’ ~ Trina Paulus Hope for the Flowers
I watched the film adaptation of Anne Michaels’ novel, Fugitive Pieces today. One of the most achingly beautiful love scenes I’ve ever seen is followed, closely, by Michaela picking up Jakob’s journal, holding it, looking at it, quizzically, curiously. she seems to be asking of it, “what else might you […]
It wasn’t very far into Ken Follet’s, The Pillars of the Earth before I understood what might be enthralling the people who’ve been telling me I should read it. “Because it will be beautiful,” Tom the Builder answered Prior Philip.