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“What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty. To experience something is to fully open one’s eyes in a way that habit prevents us from doing, and if two people open their eyes in this way at the same time, then we can expect them to be drawn together by it.”
–Alain de Botton, On Love (1993)
“The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had impressed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but little coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold or silver head ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at internals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbor’s beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which had become impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants, and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of rightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes — sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and unencumbered minds of the desert dwellers.”
–T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)
Scholars and professional translators have determined that “ilunga” — a word in the Bantu language of Tshiluba for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time — is the “most untranslatable word in the world. “Shlimazl”, a Yiddish word for a chronically unlucky person, and “radioukacz”, a Polish word for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, ran a close second and third. The most untranslatable word in the English language was voted to be “plenipotentiary”, which means a special ambassador or envoy, invested with full powers.
“I find the very image-conscious culture that we live in to be incredibly oppressive. …It fascinates me, especially now in this media-driven age, that we’re encouraged to purchase a pre-packaged experience rather than have the experience ourselves. You know, you watch the politicians debate, and, as if that wasn’t phony enough, then there’s a commentary afterwards where someone’s going, ‘Well, I thought he looked really good. He handled himself. He seemed at ease.’ They don’t even comment on what the person said; they’re commenting on how he appeared as he said it. …I think as human beings we have a spiritual need to live an authentic life, and that’s becoming more and more difficult. You see so many people who strive to live the inauthentic life and then they get there and they wonder why they’re not happy.”
–Alan Ball, Creative Screenwriting interview, Jan/Feb 2000
At the Vagabonding.net Q&A, Jos
“A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad: I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s; then, to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.”
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599), Act 4, Scene 1
Note: David Stanley posted this quote in the “comments” section some days ago, and I thought it was worthy of bumping it up to the main page…
“Nihilism as a mere philosophical indulgence may prove socially quite harmless. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing in the world today is an active form of nihilism in social and political realms threatening the very fabric of human existence. [It] assumes various names, and it is so tragic and unfortunate that some of those names bear a semblance of religiosity and self-proclaimed spirituality. Vicious terrorists who concoct weapons out of religion are superficial literalists clinging to most simplistic ideas. They are utterly incapable of understanding that, perhaps inadvertently, they are turning religion into the handmaiden of the most decadent ideologies. While terrorists purport to be serving the cause of religion and accuse all those who disagree with them of heresy and sacrilege, they are indeed serving the very ideologies they condemn…
“Christian thinkers in the nineteenth century put forward the idea that religion should be seen as a venue for social solidarity. Now that the world is on the verge of chaos, struggling with violence, the notion of Christian solidarity should prove helpful in calling for peace and security. In the Holy Koran, human beings are invited to join their efforts in ta
“One archetype that hits me very forcefully, as it does many people, is that when I’m wandering around the Himalayas, for example, most of the people that I see are Westerners from Germany, California, or the Netherlands, who are wearing sandals, Indian smocks, and are in search of enlightenment, antiquity, peace, and all the things they can’t get in the west. Most of the people they meet are Nepali villagers in Lee jeans, Reeboks, and Madonna T-shirts who are looking for the paradise that they associate with Los Angeles — a paradise of material prosperity and abundance. So it’s tantalizing because we can better see what we don’t have. The other man’s grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.”
–Pico Iyer, from an interview in The Sun, Jan. 1996
A current foray into screenwriting has me researching movie writing materials — and a small item under “Pitch Sales” in the May/June 1999 issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine gave me a chill when I read it last night. It reads:
“New Line Cinema has landed a blow to opponents in a bidding war for Nosebleed, a comedy-action pitch for Rush Hour star Jackie Chan. The TKO was delivered in the form of a pricetag of $600,000 against $850,000 for the story of a window washer at the World Trade Center who befriends a bartender and a waitress. The threesome attempt to abort what they perceive as a terrorist plan to bomb the building again.”
Indeed, for all the talk of the failure of the CIA and the Bush administration to predict the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, it looks like Hollywood had not only considered the possibility a good two years in advance — it had a bidding war over it.
“To our so-called modern way of thinking, time is money. As a result, we all have very little time. …It’s so expensive that no one can afford much of it. Yet isn’t it curious that the richer you are, the less time you can spare from tending your riches? What’s the catch? Catch-22? Not really, because these time-and-money rules apply only when you play that particular game. By switching to a new game, one which in this case involves vagabonding, time becomes the only possession and everyone is equally rich in it by biological inheritance. (Did you know you were born rich?) Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa (1971)
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
