Nostalgia
Whenever you suggest that history is a matter of losses as well as gains, whenever you call attention to what we’ve lost along the way, whether it’s something we deliberately set aside or something we just forgot to pack, a great chorus starts shouting “Nostalgia!” You may not even want to have packed it; you may think that we chose as well as we could have in the circumstances; but you need only hint that something of value, even of some tiny tiny value, that we once held we hold no longer, and it starts: “always the loud angry crowd, / Very angry and very loud,” crying: “Nostalgia!”
It’s a bullying cry, but they’re not bullying you, at least not primarily. They’re bullying that little voice within them that wonders whether there might be more to the future than “everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” Nothing could be more essential than to silence that quiet, that ever-so-gently skeptical voice.
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Takefumi Aida
’ It’s impossible to make architecture move, although i’d like to’ T. Aida
Aida started with ‘silence’ in earlier seventies, toying with ‘playfulness’ metaphor for a series of residential projects structured from images of child’s building blocks. But
from mid-eighties onwards, he purposes a system of architectural ordering _ fluctuation_ applying this on its metaphorical usage more than in its physics terms.
Moving from the theory of fluctuation to fluctuating architecture Aida manages the perception of movement created by people’s passage through his work with a carefully controled sequence of unfolding views that the visitors generate as they move.
He has applied this concept of (yuragi) ‘fluctuation’ to civic spaces, mixed-used architectures and to one of Tokyo’s modern sacred sites, theTokyo Memorial Park as you can see on images above.
Leaving the EU is no small affair. It probably will have enormous effects on the UK, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. But just what these effects will be is unclear. To have even a rudimentary sense of the pros and cons of Brexit, a person would need to possess tremendous social scientific knowledge. One would need to know about the economics and sociology of trade and immigration, the politics of centralized regulation, and the history of nationalist movements. But there is no reason to think even a tenth of the UK’s population has a basic grasp of the social science needed to evaluate Brexit.
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How does one become a member of the epistocracy? Can you just vote yourself in?
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How often must you be wrong before you get booted out of the epistocracy?
3) Granted that average people don’t know much, do epistocrats know significantly more? Enough more that they should be trusted with rule? If you think so, what’s your evidence?
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bibliotheca-sanctus: The Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I visited this library a couple of years ago when I was giving a talk at Vassar — it’s really an exceptionally lovely building.
patriotism true and false
On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word ‘love’ means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word 'love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
Until about 30 years ago, writers like [Graham] Greene were not at all accessible to the reading public; they did not turn up for signings at bookstores or allow themselves to be pimped by publicists or buttonholed by TV producers who promised fame and better sales. They existed in their work, in their biographical notes and in the usually outdated photos on their book jackets. Invisible, they were the more powerful for seeming forever elsewhere. These writers bewitched the imaginations of those of us who grew up in that period of glamour and solitude, and who wished to be writers ourselves.
We have learned to find our identity in our velocity. And that’s not just physically dangerous, but spiritually devastating.
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Lin employed an equally timeless form for the nearby Riggio-Lynch Chapel of 2004, a simple but beautifully crafted wooden structure whose subtly curving contours recall those of a boat, a reference that harks back to early Christian iconography of the church as a barque akin to that of Jesus and his apostles as they fished on the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, the architectural term “nave” — the main enclosure of a sanctuary—stems from the Latin navis (ship).
The Quiet Power of Maya Lin by Martin Filler | The New York Review of Books. Filler is so right about Maya Lin, but it’s curious that neither he nor his editors know that the primary reference of church-as-navis is to Noah’s ark. The Church is the ship of salvation, the instrument of God’s rescue of His people, as the Ark had been earlier.
