Books
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Listening while relaying a message
The musician on stage is a hearing conglomerate. He has to listen to himself, perceive what he plays, and react to it. At the same time, he has to anticipate his playing and overlook the complete piece. Simultaneously, he plays for the listeners in the tenth or twenty-third row, and listens, as it were, with…
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Prolonging Transcendental States
“Transcendent states are often desperately short-lived: a few moments late at night or at dusk; on a plane or train journey across wide open country. But we can, through certain ingredients (especially lavender, cardamom, turmeric, and cinnamon), access them a little more systematically and thereby loosen the grip of our insistent egos.” In “Thinking &…
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On Taste
On a superficial view, we may seem to differ very widely from each other in our reasonings, and no less in our pleasures: but notwithstanding this difference, which I think to be rather apparent than real, it is probable that the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures. For…
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February 13 1883
Around three in the afternoon, one hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, Dr. Friedrich Keppler established that the great master did not survive a heart attack. Friedrich Nietzsche completed the first part of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the “sacred hour of Wagner’s death”. After reading the news in the papers the next morning, he…
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Ending again, and again…
“Indubitable signs teach us that this globe had already undergone several complete changes, which have been in effect ends of the world; and I do not know what instinct it is which warns us that there will be still more of them.” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) in “The Physiology of Taste” (Meditation 10)
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Apple Wisdom
The seeds found in apples are bitter. Sounds like a natural defense against animals feasting on them. In addition, genetically, each seed will produce an apple tree which bears apples of a different variety. Naturally, each distinct variety would only exist as long as the lifespan of its tree of provenance. Source: “Botany of Desire”…
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A Good Morning is… that the Sun has not come up for nothing
A good morning is a warm meal for comfort in a hearty plantain purée; a noble joy to the palate and to the soul, reviving the memory of a wonderful Indonesian rain season; accompanied by the glance at a book that spells out who we are, and revitalizes being, beyond what we have believed to…
Sila Blume 