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Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
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I’ve never heard of someone being denied acceptance to a university because they spent a weekend binge-watching Arrested Development and eating pizza bagels. It might take a little convincing, but you owe it to yourself.
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Such are our linguistic gifts that a few sentences can conjure the story of a life: a status update, an email, a few text messages. Almost without our noticing, we weave worlds from these snapshots, until an illusion of unbroken narrative emerges from a handful of paragraphs.
My experience made me understand that the best way to stop feeling that time is fleeing is just to sit somewhere for a while. I discovered that living within silence is rejuvenating. That the parade of hours is busier than the ploughing-through of miles. That the eye never tires of splendour.
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We have come to consider unbeautiful nature deserving of attention (and potentially, of preservation) and the process has dialled up scepticism about ‘natural’ beauty more generally. The bouquet of cut flowers gives away nothing of the stooped labour required to cultivate it, nor the agrochemicals that prolong unblemished blooms, the emissions generated by transportation and refrigeration, or the species supplanted by commercial hothouses. The sublime landscape, emptied of people, does not tell of the evictions required to create a nature reserve. To equate the beautiful with the good is to disregard how beautiful things come to be. According to its critics, this is beauty’s insidious underside: how beauty is normalised as apolitical and even trivial, when in fact it is neither.
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How Learning a Foreign Language Reignited My Imagination
I could tell how two people with no shared language could fall easily and deeply in love; how the way a man expresses longing, or a woman expresses possibility, could be like discovery; how an entire person could be, to another, a long, dark country.
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To pay attention, to attend. To be present, not merely in body — it is an action of the spirit. ‘Attend my words’ means incline your spirit to my words. Heed them. A sentence is a track along which heeding is drawn. A painting is a visual path that looking follows. A musical composition does the same for listening. Art is a summoning of attention. To create it requires the highest directed focus, as does experiencing it.
Why we need to invent new words
It is easy to forget there was a time before dictionaries, when everything was less defined and words had a little more wiggle room. This kept the English language alive. Dictionaries turned the language from a house that we are all free to renovate, into a museum we are only allowed to look at. So go ahead, step over that velvet rope, make up your own words. Remember that somebody, a long time ago, made up every single word in this sentence.
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.
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Icelanders are proud of their language and yet also speak English with disarming style, choosing words carefully—for example, a photographer tells me that he prefers 35mm film cameras over digital because “film has more charisma.” Or, a woman says to me of her life, she is “always busy with the moment”—not busy because of her job and kids and spin class but “with the moment,” as if each moment is her partner.
Travel: Dispatch from a Shrinking Planet
People say that because of Google Earth and the Net, travel is less of a priority. I would say the opposite is the case. The very fact of easy interconnection, and the illusion such contact creates of understanding, makes travel ever more necessary. The world is not what it seems.
I think the world has been made more restless, more volatile, more impatient through the Internet, and it has robbed people of contemplative solitude and introduced a new solitude, a sort of loneliness induced by a buzz of information. But these very alterations in culture, far from diminishing curiosity, have made much of the world less predictable, more dramatic and accessible, full of paradoxes that have to be seen to be believed.
1. People who “hate getting old” are idiots. Every year is a privilege. Let me tell you, callow miserabilists: getting to 60 feels like a triumph.
6. When someone starts a sentence “I’m not being…”, they always are.
8. All these memories darting through my mind like discarded fairground goldfish in a sewer. The random kindnesses of strangers, how they glide and shimmer.
17. The scarier the world becomes, the more important it is to focus on the correct use of “less” and “fewer”.
35. There is not a single bad mood that cannot be lifted, however grudgingly, by reading a Larkin poem.
