Walkability 3

26 Tuesday Mar 2024

Posted by in Architecture

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Marcher un pied en moins

ou l’autre jambe raccourcie

pressé d’un pas réduit

basculant en torsion

jambe par l’autre entravée

rebondissant très mal

pour toutes sortes de raisons

précisément aucune

en petits sauts progresse

par bouts de ficelle.

La surface du puzzle s’est accrue

jusqu’à épouser la moindre anfractuosité

du dernier point visible

tel Daedalus égaré creusant son labyrinthe

pour s’en évader

revenir au plan.

Pas la moindre seconde à perdre

pourtant il n’y a aucun temps en réserve

le temps que j’imagine n’existe pas.

Essentially Good

08 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by in Jewish wisdom, Jewishness, La justice des hommes

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As long as one does not believe that he is good, he cannot believe that another is good. Only a person that believes that his own essence is good, and accustoms himself to give and not take (thereby removing the veil of the “I”) will be able to expand the light outward toward another. A person who has worked on himself to see himself as good, but still has a habit of taking and not giving, will find a barrier created by his desire to take. Such a person might think of himself as good, with a bad garment, but of another individual as inherently bad. Why? Because he has set up a barrier between himself and another. His desire to take makes him a distinct entity, so although he knows that he is good with an evil garment, he will not be able to apply that attitude toward others. The desire to take is a barrier, and he wants to keep the goodness for himself. His eye will be like that of Bilaam, “an evil eye”. Only if he has also developed a desire to give can he expand the good found in him to another, and by doing so, he will see the entire creation as good. This expansion of goodness to the whole world will bring out in him the world of inner, true love that unifies all of the creations.

(Rabbi Itamar Schwartz)

Dualisms

08 Monday Jan 2024

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Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. We believe it is important to search for love’s truths… To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.

[…]

To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others… Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.

bell hooks

Rashomon effect

05 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by in Cinema

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,

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. The script portrays such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ago. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.”—Akira Kurosawa

Bien dire et ne rien faire.

01 Wednesday Nov 2023

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Descartes se proposait de “bien juger pour bien faire” ; Wittgenstein, quant à lui, de “bien faire et ne rien dire.” Je me demande si, à ce stade de ma vie et un peu plus réconcilié avec ma médiocrité, la sagesse ne serait pas plutôt pour moi d’observer la maxime inverse — tout aussi inapplicable — : bien dire et ne rien faire.

In Sur le blabla et le chichi des philosophes

The Whole World Was Created Only For My Sake

25 Wednesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Jewish wisdom

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The Gemara says that a person should say to himself, “The whole world was created only for my sake.” This thought has far reaching implications. When you realize that the whole world was created for no one but you, it follows that you are the only person in the entire world, and that the survival or destruction of the world hinges on your choice to do good or evil. Since you are the only one around, you need not be concerned about the opinions of others when you are serving G-d, for next to you, all else is of secondary importance. When you look at life from this perspective then you will serve G-d with total devotion, without any ulterior motive or muddled thinking. You will then break down all the klippos – the outer barriers that prevent you from perceiving holiness.

(Degel Machaneh Ephraim)