blue-and-nerdy - Tumblr blog

[blue-and-nerdy]

“At a time, when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.”

- Barack Obama on books in NYT

[blue-and-nerdy]

The Adventures of Marx and Engels, #8

[blue-and-nerdy]

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

Rumi (via quotemadness)

[blue-and-nerdy]

me

🐧

[blue-and-nerdy]

🙂

[blue-and-nerdy]

Per Kristian Nygård. 

[blue-and-nerdy]

The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at the liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. 

After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.

- Virginia Woolf on how to read

[blue-and-nerdy]

photo from http://johanlolos.com/portfolio_page/northern-norway/

[blue-and-nerdy]

Norway

from http://johanlolos.com/

[blue-and-nerdy]

“When I sit down at the desk I feel no better than someone who falls and breaks both legs in the middle of the traffic of the Place de l'Opéra.  All the carriages, despite their noise, press silently from all directions in all directions, but that man's pain keeps better order than the police, it closes his eyes and empties the Place and the streets without the carriages having to turn about.  The great commotion hurts him, for he is really an obstruction to traffic, but the emptiness is no less sad, for it unshackles his real pain...”

- From Franz Kafka’s diaries, 10 Dec 1910

[blue-and-nerdy]

Random Thought #001

Just thought that for me the best music is the kind that makes me stop for a moment - no matter what i’m doing - and see the world around clearly in its wholeness, embrace absurdity, and complexity, and beauty, and sadness, and a flicker of light and warmth at the same time, and everything, everything else.

[blue-and-nerdy]

“Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce, owner of Stereotype Design in New York City. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have (almost) nothing to do with one another, Mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, new wave, and indie rock show flyers into International Typographic Style posters.”

[blue-and-nerdy]

”...perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.”

- C. Northcote Parkinson “Parkinson’s Law”

[blue-and-nerdy]

“...people do the stupidest things in the pursuit of happiness. Buy homes they can’t afford. Get into dangerous relationships. Spend thousands at Starbucks. Hoard so much useless junk in their garage that that can’t even put their car inside. Rob convenience stores. Blow up synagogues. Go to law school when they don’t want to. Drink and drive. Order the same thing on the menu every time. Fight people at drinking establishments. Go on Dr Phil. Let talents stagnate and dry up. Amass insurmountible debt. Live exactly like their parents did, and shame others for being different.

...we think we already know how to find happiness, which usually involves acquiring something we don’t have. More money, better security, more affection. In other words, we think happiness is created by making some kind of change in the material world. Putting something into our possession, eliminating a threat, seizing control of something.

The mistake we make is that we confuse what we want with symbols of what we want. We human beings seem to be the first animal capable of abstraction, and we make great use of symbols. Certain events come to promise feelings of freedom, like when you leave the office on a Friday, or when someone else says they’ll take a project off your hands. Some events represent feelings of worth, like when everyone laughs at your joke, or when your crush flirts with you.

We have a way of evaluating everything that happens, and every possession we acquire, in terms of what feelings we believe are promised by a given thing or event. The material event and the feelings that event represents are not the same thing. But we forget that all the time.

All we ever seek, and all we ever avoid are feelings. Feelings run the world. They constitute the only useful product of all material transactions between humans and their environment. Just like your body can’t use the food it eats for energy until it’s turned to glucose, we can’t really make use of the things we seek until they deliver certain feelings. Feelings are the currency of human experience. They are the only real incentive.

I seek money, because some part of me knows that with it I can buy things and do things that will deliver feelings of joy, security, wonder, or freedom. I want those feelings and so I often think it is actually the money that I want.

I avoid traffic jams, because some part of me knows that they will deliver feelings of frustration. It’s really feelings of frustration I want to avoid, but often think that a big expanse of slowly moving cars is itself a terrible thing.

If I’m not conscious of what material thing is symbolizing what feeling in my mind, then I run the risk of mistaking the material thing to be what I actually want, or what I want to avoid.

The terrorist who bombs the synagogue is trying to blow up his feelings of frustration and powerlessness over living in an occupied territory. He believes he’ll find the catharsis he needs by doing this.

The overextended husband who buys too much house thinks he is actually buying relief from the shame he feels about having grown up poor. He won’t get that relief, and he will pay dearly for trying. He thinks the house is what he wants.

All terrible decisions, made ultimately in the pursuit of happiness.

Every horrible story in your newspaper is somebody seeking a feeling they think will bring them closer to happiness — or more often, take them farther from unhappiness. They don’t realize it’s feelings they’re seeking though. They believe that a particular change in the material world is what they want. A bigger car. A life insurance settlement. A law degree. A dead mistress. A trunkful of free topsoil.

Why are we so prone to this mistake? Because we’ve been given a powerful tool that we don’t know how to use yet. We’re millions of years of reptile brain wrapped in a thin layer of abstraction and intuition and reason. It’s a poweful setup but we’re still working out techniques. That’s why there’s never been a shortage of philosophers trying to break it all down, arguing about the best way to live.

Some ways are better than others, definitely. We can’t help but stumble upon a few of them while we’re out and about in the world, even if we have no plan at all. But in the mean time you’ll be doing better than 90% of the pack if you make a habit of thinking about what feelings you’re actually seeking when you feel like you want a thing. What you want is never a thing.”

David Cain “What you want is never a thing”

from raptitude.com

[blue-and-nerdy]

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. 

-Viktor Frankl “Logotherapy in a Nutshell”

[blue-and-nerdy]

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

- Viktor Frankl “The Case for a Tragic Optimism”

[blue-and-nerdy]

- Massive Attack “Karmacoma”