On beauty

Read this in my wanderings through books. Liked the use of words...

The Western conception of beauty – a stylized fantasy constructed by airbrushing reality into a narrow and illusory ideal of perfection.

Whereas,

The zenith of Japanese aesthetics is deeply rooted in the glorious imperfection of the present moment and its relationship to the realities of the past.

Susan Sontag again

Her take on Literature and Television:

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances – immures us in our own indifference.

In Literature - stories.....there is always an ethical component. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution. Television offers obtuseness, non-understanding, passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling through its glut of unending stories.

Who else but Susan Sontag could have written this

'Literature's essential allure – the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life's infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one.

A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility.'

I loved this one -

'Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.'

Loved this word

describing modern devices...iDistraction

An utterly delicious thought

We are cultural stardust.

Loved these two statements

1, We take our personal histories with us when we travel.

Got this from: Cruising the Past, from Baltimore to Charleston
By Susan Stewart


And another one I came across was this one:


2. On our journeys....

The weight of your emotional baggage may vary.

A strange usage

I was talking to a professional Kathak dancer yesterday, who also teaches dance. She was bemoaning the fact that her students just don't put in enough time for practice, and worse, really don't want to learn about the Kathak dance form. She said:

Nowadays the children only want maggi dance.

What she meant was that children want something instant - something they can learn just for that one show...