The longer way

Sometimes, in life, the longer way is the shorter way.

(Dr. Divago)

Know everything there is to be known

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. 

(Alan Alexander Milne)

The Age of Growth?

«We are nearing the end of a unique period in human history. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the coalfields of England over two hundred years ago, is now entering its final stage in the oil fields of the Middle East. (…) In fact, the Industrial Age can be viewed as a convenient metaphor for the process of transforming, exchanging, and discarding nonrenewable energy. Our entire economic structure is built from and propelled by fossil fuels. (…) It is ironic indeed that we have called our age the Age of Growth. We are convinced that we have discovered a process for churning out perpetual wealth when instead we have only been borrowing from the past. (…) We are, in truth, the wily and ingenious scavengers of history. (…) The end of the age of fossil fuels presages the end of the Industrial Age that has been molded from it. This is the hard reality that is so difficult to fathom».

(Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny, Penguin Books, 1984).

Life as a dream 人生如夢

Wu-wei

«The sound of the water says what I think».

(Chuang Tzu)

A man’s size

«Your estimation of a man’s size will be affected by the distance at which you stand from him, but in two entirely opposite ways according as it is his physical or his mental stature that you are considering. The one will seem smaller, the farther off you move; the other, greater.»

(Arthur Schopenhauer)

To know love

I went out into the clear air

I went out into the clear air

and raised my eyes to the heavens

to understand our stars

and their January brilliance.

I found the key to the riddle;

I grasped the hieroglyphs’ secret;

I carried into our own tongue

the work of the star-poet.

I recorded all this on a stump,

on frozen bark,

since I had no paper with me

in that January dark.

(Varlam Shalamov)