5.11.2021 – still felt a certain

still felt a certain
cultural unworthiness
Arts didn’t belong

Adapted from the book, Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally (2007 by The Serpentine Publishing Co., Pty., Ltd.) and the passage:

In a room I shared with my brother, a medical student, I had written my first book during the summer school holidays of 1962–63. It was a time when Australians still felt a certain post-colonial sense of cultural unworthiness and yearning. The arts didn’t seem to belong much to us. I knew no writers. If there were any, why would they hang around Homebush? Unknown to me, a number of heroic writers, including Dal Stivens and Morris West, were at the time establishing the Australian Society of Authors, but that was a poorly reported event.

Searching for Schindler is the book behind the book, Schindler’s List.

Thomas Keneally’s use of language and ‘being from Australia’ in an ‘Oh are from Australia?’ world anecdotes are worth the read.

5.10.2021 – fastidiously

fastidiously
tidy air of precision
everything he did

From the description of Dr George Abbershaw in The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham (1904-1966) (published by William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1929).

I have to love the writing of the 1930s.

I think they thought, wrote and inexpressibly expressed themselves like this, leaving me grasping for the now non existent thesaurus.

Ms. Allingham wrote:

He was a smallish man, chubby and solemn, with a choir-boy expression and a head of ridiculous bright-red curls which gave him a somewhat fantastic appearance.

He was fastidiously tidy in his dress and there was an air of precision in everything he did or said which betrayed an amazingly orderly mind.

Apart from this, however, there was nothing about him to suggest that he was particularly distinguished or even mildly interesting, yet in a small and exclusive circle of learned men Dr George Abbershaw was an important person.

5.9.2021 – another story,

they remind us from
whom and where we came and give
others, in a bite

Based on a passage from My Life Through Food, (Gallery Books, New York, 2021).

The passage reads:

Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss; they’re things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created.

But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes.

Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time.

Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again.

The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them.

For more on this book, please see the post 11.8.2021 – our history’s parts.

Please note, this post was NOT created on the date in the title.

5.8.2021 – life might be a

life might be about
outside constraints of work and
struggle survival

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.

Adapted from the book, The Art of Travel (2002, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton.

According to the website, GOOD READS, Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why.

As I said in the section on Architecture , what I find irresistible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, hey, I would.

5.7.2021 – surmount this state of

surmount this state of
sterile relativism with
eloquent remarks

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

However, there might be a way to surmount this state of sterile relativism with the help of John Ruskin’s provocative remark about the eloquence of architecture.

The remark focuses our minds on the idea that buildings are not simply visual objects without any connection to concepts which we can analyse and then evaluate.

Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned.

They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.

What Ruskin is quoted as saying is:

‘A day never passes without our hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony.

What could be more harmful, he asked, than to believe that a ‘new architecture is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or parish church?

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.