
I took the picture of today driving back from my first booster shot. I like the effect of the snow and the wet window I was taking my pictures through.
I took the picture of today driving back from my first booster shot. I like the effect of the snow and the wet window I was taking my pictures through.
Lonely tree, besides an empty crossing.
The world is slowly turning, but I can still see the remainder of this beautiful sunset when I look over my shoulder.
Essays, Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received.
“My perfumed doublet gratifies my own smelling at first; but after I have worn it three days together, ’tis only pleasing to the bystanders. This is yet more strange, that custom, notwithstanding long intermissions and intervals, should yet have the power to unite and establish the effect of its impressions upon our senses, as is manifest in such as live near unto steeples and the frequent noise of the bells. I myself lie at home in a tower, where every morning and evening a very great bell rings out the Ave Maria: the noise shakes my very tower, and at first seemed insupportable to me; but I am so used to it, that I hear it without any manner of offense, and often without awaking at it.”
Michel de Montaigne
Another year is almost over, and the funny thing is, you don’t have to do anything for it; it’s a straight line no matter what happened on the sides of that road.
The camera used as an art tool can make the dark darker and the light lighter. Is it more interesting than the real world? Or true?
“As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer.”
Vincent van Gogh
The sun sets around four here in Trondheim, and I could take this picture because I have a vacation and was sitting on my couch.
“When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I drive past the tree if I go to work, I drive past the red shed if I want to go to the city.
“Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay”.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
From our living room, we have a nice view over the valley to the sea; the sea is just behind the horizon. This is the most prominent tree, and today we had a light blizzard, and it did what I usually would do in my photo editing program…if I am lucky.
From our window today.
Today I just look at the sky…
Today I was in the hospital for a minor operation; I had a hernia in the groin. It was the first time for me to be in a hospital for myself and not for a visit. Like I approach most things in life, I was quite interested in the process. It was not that interesting or exhilarating looking back, but I remember two things the most: when I took a selfie for my family, I saw myself in the picture as an old guy in a hospital. Both things are, of course, through, but it is the instant association with hospitals and sickness when you see these “clothes” on you. Seeing myself like this made it immediately different from a routine visit to the doctor or dentist. It was not stressful; it just made it more official and serious than the feeling I had when I went into it, just an observation. Maybe we could have some fancier and more colorful clothes next time, and all the patients wear a baseball cap with a smile on it, so everybody still knows who’s who, just a little bit more joy and colors.
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life
Excerpt of part 3
History thus belongs in the second place to him who preserves and reveres – to him who looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence. By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence – and thus he serves life…
…Sometimes this clinging to one’s own environment and companions, one’s own toilsome customs, one’s own bare mountainside, looks like obstinacy and ignorance -yet it is a very salutary ignorance and one most calculated to further the interests of the community: a fact of which anyone must be aware who knows the dreadful consequences of the desire for expeditions and adventures, especially when it seizes whole hordes of nations, and who has seen from close up the condition a nation gets into when it has ceased to be faithful to its own origins and is given over to a restless, cosmopolitan hunting after new and ever newer things. The feeling antithetical to this, the contentment of the tree in its roots, the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one’s existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified – it is this which is today usually designated as the real sense of history…
…The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate…