by beatriceotto | Aug 17, 2018 | writing & writers
Henry Miller is himself a wonderful writer, and this comment about a critical element of successful story-telling took me by surprise. While I am not sure what to make of it, I’ve also turned it over in my mind to see if it would serve as a license to take...
by beatriceotto | May 17, 2018 | a quote to note
Yes, there is much you can do to transmute mud into brightness if you have enough time. I love the variety of interpretations I find regarding time and our relationship to it, and here it is cast at its most helpful, as the element that can ‘ripen all’. Of...
by beatriceotto | May 3, 2018 | a quote to note
Jesus lays out a few ground rules to Judas whom, it seems, could have done with a dose of quinuituq. I loved this lesson in patience, and the idea that men and trees are bound by the same laws of God. “If you love me, be patient. Look at the trees. Are they...
by beatriceotto | Apr 20, 2018 | writing & writers
Any absorbing activity has this magical effect of taking you almost outside of time, until you look at the clock and feel as if it’s speeded ahead. It seemed appropriate to share this after we have put the clocks forward for summer. ‘Time never passes so...
by beatriceotto | Apr 20, 2018 | language & translation
A fascinating insight into how we fold our perceptions of time into language, or language influences such perceptions. It made me realise that my assumptions about time, how I engage with and experience it, may have been strongly shaped by the languages I grew up...
by beatriceotto | Apr 20, 2018 | language & translation
Another angle on language and how it shapes or at least influences our perception of time. Here Adam Nicolson discusses the anchoring of tense in many languages, while others allow things to happen in a more imprecise location in time. ‘The sky is the great...
by beatriceotto | Apr 19, 2018 | a quote to note
The past is a place which enriches me in almost all I do, and I love travelling there as much as I love travelling abroad. As Henry Miller said, it ‘fructifies the present’, and I see history as a vertical version of geography – a place you can...
by beatriceotto | Apr 19, 2018 | a quote to note
A heartening description of time as the great irrigator of the world. See another such ripening interpretation by Kazantzakis. ‘Time ran on like immortal water, and irrigated the world.’ Source: Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, trans. P.A. Bien...
by beatriceotto | Apr 12, 2018 | a quote to note
A striking metaphor for time hovering or collapsing, in two versions of a bird, alive and flying, or keeling and dying. ‘Time still hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving...
