Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Society

  • Quotes of the Day

    “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny. (…) There is danger there – a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all…

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  • Arrival: The Gift of Language (A Film Review)

    Is time really linear and sequential like our writing? Or could it be, for a more advanced awareness, circular: a spherical sum of simultaneities? When past and future become perceptible and intertwined, is the present any more tangible than the emotion of a flashback or the knowledge of a glimpse forward? Is a vision, a…

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  • Revisiting the Stoics

    Well, you know what they say, some things never change. Anxious, dissatisfied, relationship not going well? So what else is new? I’ve recently come across the following, from Epictetus: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” (…) “Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion,…

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  • Walk, sadness, walk!

    I took my sadness for a walk. I walked it right out of the park, past the tram stops and onto the streets flooded with the slow, hesitant steps of old age.   I walked and walked and walked it out of my body. Then I walked some more with it like one walks with…

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  • Ancient words of counsel?

    “It may be said that every individual man and all men in common aim at a certain end which determines what they choose and what they avoid. This end, to sum it up briefly, is HAPPINESS AND ITS CONSTITUENTS. (…) We may define happiness as prosperity combined with virtue; or as independence of life; or…

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  • On the future of education

    Motto: “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn – and change.” (Carl Rogers) I’m a structured learner. I admit it. I like engorging information, reflecting upon it, and structuring it mentally or on paper. But it is only when I manage to enrich that information with something…

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  • No justification for mass murders

    I have kept my mouth shut for the past week to process the terrifying and abhorrent events that unfolded in Germany and France. Trying to get to the facts. Trying to make sense of the senselessness. But as I keep browsing through (parts of) the press, I can keep quiet no longer. I have read too…

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  • Toni Erdmann – A Must See

    Toni Erdmann, which has just opened in Germany, is a bizarre independent film that will make you embrace Romania with all you’ve got, and which also manages to lampoon the trappings of corporate life just the right amount. (The impossible loneliness, the ridiculous helplessness of wrestling with a dress that’s too tight amidst the barren luxury…

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  • Quote of the day

    The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less. Vaclav Havel – Letters to Olga (1988), p. 237

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  • Thought of the day

    “Every one begins to survey the rest, and wishes to be surveyed himself; and public esteem acquires a value. He who sings or dances best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, the most eloquent, comes to be the most respected: this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.…

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  • Thought of the day

    “His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances. He would have to learn the reality of a thing…

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