The Meaning of Silence
If you go into a place of very great quiet and stay there for a while, you become aware first of all of the individuality, the identity perhaps, of any sound that penetrates it. If the silence is deep enough we may hear a watch tick. In a quiet library, the turning of a page, the scratch of pencil on paper, are separate, distinctive, sounds. They identify themselves to us, they have a personality. They are beautiful.
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours in the library, dipping into books, choosing which ones to take home and which ones to skim quickly and leave behind. These days, prolonged silence has a tendency to make me restless. (via TMN)
Solitude vs. Loneliness
Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely. It is a positive and constructive state of engagement with oneself. Solitude is desirable, a state of being alone where you provide yourself wonderful and sufficient company.
(via TMN)
The Disembodied Book
No book need ever go unpublished in the future – this is the good news for the overlooked and misunderstood. Everyone will have the chance to present their work to the world, be it on open source platforms or social networks. Of course this doesn’t mean competition flies out the window. But it is safe to assume that under the mountains of digital shelf warmers, true gems are slumbering away. At the other end of the spectrum, then, the mass of today’s average, low and no earners will get their chance at a piece of the pie.
(via Bookforum)
The Pursuit of Aptitude
As a child of the rural Midwest, I felt decidedly out of place at Princeton among the debonair Eastern prep-school graduates who still, in the early 1980s (just a decade or so after the campus went co-ed) seemed to embody its privileged heritage, so I could scarcely imagine the alienation of these other yet more marginalized students. And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. Because I came from a geographic region that Princeton hadn’t favored in the past, but which it was now intent on drawing from, I was also a sort of affirmative-action student.
What’s more, the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions. Maybe their SAT scores were lower than mine, but they ranked higher than I did on the effort scale. And on the bravery scale too.
A system of advancement by aptitude, by statistical measurements of mental acuity, doesn’t concern itself with determination and courage, but if the world were truly fair, it would.
As friend said once “There are geniuses, and then there are the rest of us, who make it up through hard work.”
Why did I not know about the Danbo flickr set before? I want to print all of these out and make a huge poster for my desk at work. Seriously.
(via artpixie)
When Money Buys Happiness
On the other side of this post, here are a few things that were both expensive and happiness inducing (sort of a list of things that are expensive but worthwhile):
- Sharing meals with friends, “jolly dinner parties”, eating out socially. The networking necessities for the hyper-social primate.
- Books: High information density per pound; excellent value.
- Quality beds, “excellent mattress”. Sleep quality is a major predictor of night-time comfort and day-time energy.
The process by which this photo was taken is just incredible:
Buelteman begins by painstakingly whittling down flowers, leaves, sprigs, and twigs with a scalpel until they’re translucent. He then lays each specimen on color transparency film and, for a more detailed effect, covers it with a diffusion screen. This assemblage is placed on his “easel”—a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between Plexiglas, floating in liquid silicone.
Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In that moment, the gas surrounding the subject is ionized, leaving behind ethereal coronas. He then hand-paints the result with white light shining through an optical fiber the width of a human hair, a process so tricky each image can take up to 150 attempts.
(via DRB)
Mr. Wolf composed his photographs, eliminating any horizon by cutting off the tops and bottoms of the buildings in his frame. There are no visual paths out of his images, making them feel claustrophobic. He calls this “no-exit photography.”
