Category: Life

6.15.2021 – another story,

part our history
be re-created over
and over again

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.

6.14.2021 – shifting the focus

shifting the focus
of discussion to become
able handle talk

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

The advantage of shifting the focus of discussion away from the strictly visual towards the values promoted by buildings is that we become able to handle talk about the appearance of works of architecture rather as we do wider debates about people, ideas and political agendas.

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.

6.13.2021 – how adjudicate

no easier to
resolve, but then no harder
what is beautiful

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

Arguments about what is beautiful emerge as no easier to resolve, but then again no harder, than disputes about what is wise or right. We can learn to defend or attack a concept of beauty in the same way we might defend or attack a legal position or an ethical stance. We can understand, and publically explain, why we believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of the things it talks to us about.

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.

6.4.2021 – wandered into my

wandered into my
local bookstore, dazed, joyful
touched all the books

Taken from The Age of Reopening Anxiety (What if we’re scared to go back to normal life?) by Anna Russel in The New Yorker.

Ms. Russell writes, “In London, the reopening of shops and other nonessential services has been like the lifting of a thick fog. I wandered into my local bookstore, dazed and joyful, and touched all the books, before seeing a sign asking customers not to touch the books.“

On the one hand I say I know just how she feels.

On the other hand, I say it is comforting to know there are people like this, besides me, still out there.

(E Shaver Booksellers – Savannah, GA – Just off Madison Square – https://goo.gl/maps/X9EgNBZpsyfv22z78)