Many years ago at a music appreciation class my teacher suggested that music was ‘noise with rhythm meant to be listened to’. I wondered at the time what difference there was between this and language? Meaning comes in many forms and some of them are not apparent to reason, they flow into us like an…
Category: Quotidial
The New Frontier
I have often thought that the search for knowledge should not just be an International effort based at NASA, but truly International with every country paying what it can for access to the knowledge and everyone sharing all the information. Not that that would ever happen because some knowledge would contain properties that different countries…
So Much News
I sometimes wonder whether it is all news or if we spend a lot of time looking at our navels. Of all the things to bring to the attention of the public a lot of news is going over things the public already know and telling us when someone has died. The news and death…
We Do Not See
Ourselves in others. We do not hear our voices in others. We do not see ourselves in the actions of others. We do not see ourselves as another colour, another culture, another person. We do not see our natures in other animals. We do not see our movements in other bodies. We do not see…
Age
They tell me the World of life, starting with the Achaean Period, is about four and half million years old. When I studied Ancient History which had the traditional syllabus of Greek history broadly across the fifth century BCE (496 – 404) and the Roman Period of 122 BCE to 14AD there were some thinkers,…
Fresh Air
After days of trying to get the images into pdf to read at 300dpi, as they were scanned, and not as 150dpi as they arrive in America, I thought the morning walk would clear my head a bit. It was very windy this morning, the ground was wet from overnight rain, the fields sinking in…
Friends
There is something in the voice. The link with memory and shared experience. The moments of laughter, sadness, the inbuilt strength of knowing how someone else thinks, how they act, recognizing their walk from the far end of the street. In the mass of strangers all of whom are friends to someone, this person is…
China
I see that China is considering a new law to be discussed this April to outlaw the killing and eating of cats and dogs. “We are proposing that all dog and cat eating should be banned because it is causing many social problems,” said Chang Jiwen, a law professor at the Chinese Academy. I have…
Trees
How well I remember as a child climbing trees. Always scared the higher I climbed but always looking at the next large bough and wondering what it would feel like to sit on it and how far I would be able to see. Then gripping it tightly as if my life depended upon it when…
Horace Walpole
I am not usually given to quotes and quoting. I very rarely read biographies though some notable human beings are worth knowing about and many who are not well known should come more to our attention. Horace probably isn’t a man I would have known well. He loved things Gothic and whilst his father was…