Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Culture

Quote of the day

“The left hemisphere is the speaking hemisphere: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature. (…) metaphor and narrative are often required to convey the implicit meanings available to the right hemisphere and in a left-hemisphere-dominated culture, metaphors and narratives are disregarded as myths and…
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In search of „Moorish” culture: My spring ramble through Andalusia

Ladies and gents… (drum roll), the English version is here. Enjoy! Day 1. The blessings of individual travel It’s not every year that we are gifted with additional time. But a leap year calls for a leap of faith, and so, I leap out of the plane from Munich to Málaga in southern Spain avid…
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Frühling in Andalusien

I thought I’d try something new today: My Andalusian travel essay in German for my German-speaking followers ;-). It’s a first for me, but here it is: Auf den Spuren Maurischer Kultur Tag 1. Der Genuss des individuellen Reisens Die Leute um mich herum schauen auf ihre Handys. Ich schaue aus dem Fenster. Mir hat das…
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Confirm humanity

‘Confirm humanity,’ the website urges and presents me with a checkbox to tick. I’d simply wanted to treat myself to a daily poem, that’s why I’m signing up for their newsletter, but, at this point, I am confronted with an existential issue: A. Is my humanity confined to that little checkbox? Is that what it…
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Quote of the day

“Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.”…
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Quote of the day

“In the world of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. (…) But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and…
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Quote of the day

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. (…) There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning,…
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Quote of the day

“The romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality. (…) But egoistic passions, when once let loose, are not easily brought again into subjection to the needs of society. (…) By encouraging a new lawless Ego, it made social cooperation impossible, and left its…
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Quote of the day

“Man, formerly too humble, begins to think of himself as almost a God. (…) In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of “truth” as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has…
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Quote of the day

“The Copernican theory should have been humbling to human pride, but in fact the contrary effect was produced, for the triumphs of science revived human pride.” Bertrand Russel – History of Western Philosophy (The Rise of Science)
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Quote of the day

“More and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.…
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Quote of the day

“… whatever else may be in perpetual flux, the meanings of words must be fixed, at least for a time, since otherwise no assertion is definite, and no assertion is true rather than false. There must be something more or less constant, if discourse and knowledge are to be possible.” Bertrand Russell – History of…
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