“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back into the pillow. That is how it is when you say mean things about people.” - John Seigenthaler Sr.
Archive for July, 2007
Round Earth, Flat World
An article by Fareed Zakaria, one of the most accessible political commentator alive at this given moment. He reflects on the book ‘The World is Flat’ and teases out some of the main themes here. I found this line thought-provoking - ‘The flat economic world has been created by an extremely unflat political world. ‘ Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how as the economic world is being levelled, the political field is likely to be levelled as well. And the sole champion of free trade and democracy, will soon be turned on its head.
Rather disquieting is how disconnected I actually am from the bustling technological advances. The only technological term that I fully understood in the whole book was Wikipedia - my essay saviour. His litany of other supposedly prosaic IT applications and functions were a first for me. Reading this book made me realised just what a pre-millenium old fogey I am. -_-” I’m beginning to understand how my parents could have been left behind by technology a decade earlier.
An uncommon definition
It is to Socrates and Plato that we owe the idea of “Platonic love” — that notion of a love that stares through and past its “object” into the eternity of Ideals and misses, therewith, both the erotic energy of the lover and the true ownership of beauty by the beloved.
Movie Reviews
Watched two great films - La Grand Voyage and Last King of Scotland. Highly recommended.
The first movie is about a religious Morrocan father and his secular French son who made the Hajj by car from France all the way to Mecca. It is a french film so you can expect the show to explore its subject can delicately. I think that it is a very moving movie that portrays Islam in a more positive light (besides its main theme about generational gap) and highlights the truer essence of Islam that is often being missed in the fundamentalist debates these days. The movie also contains beautiful shots of Istanbul, Mecca and some other countries that I cannot recognise - they passed quite a few countries from France to Mecca. There is also this interesting juxtaposition of mainstream Muslim thinking and the Sufi’s way of looking at things towards the end of the show and a quote from the Quran about why the father chose to make the journey by car. It was produced just last year and it is quite unique because it is the first fictional piece that was permitted to be shot in Mecca, according to a website that I read.
The second one was about Idi Amin, the Uganda dictator and his Scot physician. I like it because it demonstrates once again what politics can do to a country. It also made me realise that politicians can promise you the heavens and send you to hell.
Lock Nietzsche up!
I am surprised by the coincidence of finding Nietzsche amidst my current flow of thoughts about life. It was seredipitous. Wandering down the lanes of bookshelves in PageOne, and looking desperately for a copy of “The Book of Quietude” by my newfound favourite writer, I heard two friends coming across Nietzsche. The conversation went like this:
A: “Oh Nietzsche, him and his talk about how God is dead”
Laughter ensues.
B: “Well, maybe God is really dead, who knows?”
More laughter ensues.
On a normal day, I would probably dismiss it as a random comment and go about my own business, but that night I had this overflowing sense of academic righteousness that was bursting at my heart. And thus, I thought instead, “What do these people know about Nietzsche. I really hate people who just throw ideas around when they might not even have a basic understanding of these ideas. But oh well, what do I know about Nietzsche to even bother? Perhaps he was not even deserving of mention, controversial as he is with all his trouble-making aphorism.” To save me from my own critical scrutiny, I picked up a book on Nietzsche and packed it along with me. Better be educated now than never.
After poring through it, I realised that he was really mistaken. Just because he had a book titled ‘Gay Science’, people assumed that he was a homosexual. Just because he said God is dead, people assume him to be an atheist apologist (as a matter of fact he issued that statement because he could not accept the way that Christianity issues what he calls a ’slave morality’, a morality that values meekness, suffering, weakness, sacrifice and pain) People dismisses his work because he descended into madness in his later years, when his earlier works did exhibit exemplary lucidity, organisation and brilliance.
Nietzsche advocates denouncing religion or any so-called moral code that subjugates the individual. He believes that the individual has long been suppressed by the herd mentality and he should free himself to achieve the ideals of an uberman. He used a thought experiment to parallel the Christian version of afterlife - if you were to live through your life repeatedly, how would you choose to live your life. He challenges his readers to focus on finding out all about oneself and emphasise that this self-knowledge is much more important than any other knowledge. I thought that this was a pretty neat idea because sometimes, people think they understand a lot about the world, how it functions and how people think but eventually they are not too certain about who they are. It is a journey, knowing oneself.
He also broached the topic of knowledge and I like the way he de-emphasised science and advocates a more well-balanced approach. He also warns of science becoming the new religion and that scientist using their much lauded ‘objectivity and empirism’ will hoodwink the masses and make believe that science was a really objective way of measuring Truth. I love this paragraph of his from ‘The Gay Science’ where he points out that although scientists can better describe things, they cannot really explain things better.
‘Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a ’scientific’ estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’. He asks, ‘ Do we really want to permit existence to be degrade to this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematics? This knowledge is ‘human, all too human”
Way cool. =)
Vanilla Wind
There is a sweet whiff of vanilla in the air and the wind caresses playfully. It smells like many yesterdays ago when we were young and when we were running around the reservoir, in high spirits. The vanilla from the Gardenia factory and the wind from just above the waters. A time when everything was simple and life wore a gentle blush. Now, the sun is setting and nostalgia envelopes like the incipient night.
