sonder

“The best way to travel, after all, is to feel, To feel everything in every way, To feel everything excessively, Because all things are, in truth, excessive And all reality is an excess, a violence, An extraordinarily vivid hallucination.”

“One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings.”

sweden: is it too late for love

I am in love with the trend of bored Architects photoshopping increasingly ridiculous ideas for the Notre Dame roof

“… I can tell you why “be yourself” is such terrible advice. The first problem with it is that it is an impossible task: a holistic self does not exist; we are made of many selves that are revealed through endless experimentation and self-examination. […] The second problem is that today’s popular notion of the self mistakes feelings and desires for self-knowledge. Heidegger thought (extremely roughly) that knowledge of one’s authentic self could be found through the consideration of our own mortality: that feeling you might get after you have a near-death experience. As the contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley put it in The Guardian, “if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death… Mortality is that in relation to which we shape and fashion our selfhood.” […] My editor asked me if the mandate to “be yourself” has negatively affected culture. The answer is a 100 percent affirmative yes. I emailed William Swann, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, to ask if he could offer a better saying than “be yourself,” and his response was very good and directly relates to this. “A nice piece of advice for someone who thinks it is a good thing to ‘be yourself’ is to watch the speech given by the leader of the free world last weekend,” he wrote. “Giving some people license to be themselves can encourage performances that are painful to watch.””