i am writing this for you. because sometimes i encounter things that i like, be they books, songs, movies, pictures and, well i think Alain de Botton put it best
"While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may not be so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.
Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginitive way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."
So maybe you can't buy objects of art but its the longing that de Botton talks about that gets me, i want to interact with these things that seemingly interact with me. So i will respond bluntly and put them on the internet.
But i defend myself, the internet; social networking, blogs etc, could be seen to be a virtual platform for self creation, i thus intend to create myself from a composite of pieces of art that embody inner qualities that i desire.
I had a blog like that, its on tumblr, infact, its here. but im moving because i also like to write, sometimes about this stuff, sometimes about my day, sometimes about nothing whatever. but i was once a good writer, or perhaps a self-deceiving but confident writer and i have since lost that confidence. but i figure writing is one of those things that improves with practice, so here i go.
That being said, im a little bit nervous. ive read some great blogs, but also some awful ones. i dont want to be the writer of an awful blog, i feel already as if this wank has been a vigourous one. sorry. or not. i dont know. here is some stuff that i like:
Franz Ferdinand's addition to the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack. I like the song better than i liked the film, its truer to Lewis Carroll's novels
A passage from my current favourite novel, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
But i defend myself, the internet; social networking, blogs etc, could be seen to be a virtual platform for self creation, i thus intend to create myself from a composite of pieces of art that embody inner qualities that i desire.
I had a blog like that, its on tumblr, infact, its here. but im moving because i also like to write, sometimes about this stuff, sometimes about my day, sometimes about nothing whatever. but i was once a good writer, or perhaps a self-deceiving but confident writer and i have since lost that confidence. but i figure writing is one of those things that improves with practice, so here i go.
That being said, im a little bit nervous. ive read some great blogs, but also some awful ones. i dont want to be the writer of an awful blog, i feel already as if this wank has been a vigourous one. sorry. or not. i dont know. here is some stuff that i like:
Franz Ferdinand's addition to the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack. I like the song better than i liked the film, its truer to Lewis Carroll's novels
"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions. To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beneath their outward silence, is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing."
A passage from my current favourite novel, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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