What are you in awe of?

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

Simplify

"To simplify where you know little is easy. To simplify where you know a great deal requires gifts of a different order: unusual penetration of mind and, above all, sheer nerve."
~Edmund S. Morgan, Yale historian

Wave and Muscle

“The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body's total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?”
-Dag Hammarskjold

In 1953, soon after his appointment as United Nations secretary general, Hammarskjöld was interviewed on radio by Edward R. Murrow. In this talk he declared: "But the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics [Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroek] for whom 'self-surrender' had been the way to self-realization, and who in 'singleness of mind' and 'inwardness' had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbours made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it."
[Henry P Van Dusen. Dag Hammarskjold. A Biographical Interpretation of Markings Faber and Faber London 1967 p 47]

Dag Hammarskjold, (29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, economist and author. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. He is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.

(Image: http://www.aikido-maastricht.nl/pics/spiral.jpg)

What makes time stop for you?

Condé Nast Traveler's piece Slow Boat to Bliss
by Jeffrey Tayler was excellent and I loved the ending - begging the question: what makes time stop for you?

I turn my eyes to the sea below, turquoise expanses foaming with breakers. I've surrendered to the healing charms of the islands, finding, as Kazantzakis declared, that "happiness is a simple, unaffected thing: a glass of wine, a chestnut, a humble little brazier, the roar of the sea." I wake up each day here wanting nothing more than to inhale the salty sea air and hold my face to the light. This is it, the utter tranquillity I've been searching for. I close my eyes, my breathing slows. Time, for me, has stopped.

The Age of the Infovore

The title and opening quote of this book first caught my attention.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy, by Tyler Cowen and "What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." - Unknown Source

I thought the book's focus was on learning styles, in general, but the actual focus was more broadly on autism and Asperger's syndrome, as a comparison to our ways of accumulating information nowadays. There are some excellent quotes and ideas.

Please find some that I found of interest:

Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb the philosophic depths (p. 3)

I would like to consider three stylized facts about today's world and put them together into a single coherent vision. The facts are the following: Culture is much cheaper and more accessible than before; we engage in more and more cultural sampling; and many intelligent people complain about how ugly contemporary culture has become. (p. 41)

I think of my blend as one very good way of absorbing information from the outside world, but it would be a mistake to elevate the informational purposes of the blend (however important) over the emotional import and the sense of connection. Most of all I think of my blend as an assembled set of stories and am assembled set of information packages. The blend is about writers I read, the public figures I read about, broader intellectual narratives about the world, and indirectly stories about my own self-discovery. To me the blend offers the ultimate in interest and suspense. Call me an addict if you wish, but if I am torn away from these stories for even a day I am keen to get back to "the next episode," so to speak. (pgs. 51-52)

Adam Smith, in his 1759 book on moral psychology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, suggested that we enjoy and value an experience more if it took more self-command and more sacrifice to bring it about. (p. 81)

The reality is that most education requires the physical presence of other human beings. (p. 113)

...we need to overcome some of our cognitive biases. That's right, a lot of the problems of politics stem from human cognition. It's not always a question of strengthening "the good guys" who are fighting "the bad guys." We all tend to think we are the good guys more often than we really are. We fight when we should give in, we stick to our guns when we should change our mind, and we do not realize that we are sometimes part of the problem rather than the solution. If we are to improve politics, we need to help ourselves overcome these biases. (p. 193)

The final message of this book is about respect for the individual. The study of human neurology is important science, but it is not just science and it is not just a tool for diagnosis or medical intervention. It is also a path toward appreciating the diversity of the human spirit, the splendor of the individual mind, and the importance of respecting the individuality of each mind. (p.222)