The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.'Why do you weep?' the goddesses asked.'I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.'Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus,' they said, 'for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand.''But... was Narcissus beautiful?' the lake asked.'Who better than you to know that?' the goddesses asked in wonder. 'After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!'The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:'I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.''What a lovely story,' the alchemist thought.
The need of theory is supported by the eros of the philosopher. It is not the expression of his will to conquer nature. Therefore, the joys of contemplation are "immediate enjoyments," joys that belong intrinsically to contemplation, and they come without further setting of goals or justification to the one receptive to them. They are not tied to social use, neither dependent upon the opinion of others nor gained from the expectation of future glory. The love for the observation of nature, for the observation of the details of the structure in which nature becomes comprehensible, of the order in which nature is articulated, of the spectacle nature provides for one who takes an interest in its objects, who lets its forms, colors, and sounds affect him, this love accords with the love of oneself. Both discourage highfalutin plans to change the world by the transformation of nature. Both impose moderation on the philosopher. He will be especially adequate to his desire to "contribute" something "to this beautiful system" by his conceiving it as a "system" and as "beautiful." The contribution most his own is that he has the whole in view; that he sees things and beings within the horizon of the whole, that he investigates and orders them as parts, that he knows himself as a part and reflects on his relation to the whole or that he poses the question of the whole. But if he wants to keep the question of the whole in view, he may not lose himself. To conceive the "beautiful system," he must devote himself to it in detail and again return to himself. To be able to observe nature, he may not blend into it. Observation requires both proximity and distance.
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
Can you do something for me? Can you take one moment, right now, and acknowledge how far you've come? Can you appreciate, completely, the lessons that all of your mistakes have already brought you and the wisdom you've collected from all of the pain that seemed so senseless at the time? Can you celebrate your journey and forget, just for a second, about the ever-changing destination?Because the truth is that there will never be a "perfect" time to appreciate yourself. There will not be a magical moment when everything is finally sorted out and you'll be naturally driven to give yourself some space to feel good about what you've been doing. Unless you make that space. Unless you create that moment.There will always be more growing to do. That is the beauty of life. There is always some new opportunity to do something new, to make something old better, to chuck out something useless, to transform something into something else. It's important to spend just as much time seizing these opportunities as appreciating the lessons they teach you and the person you become from seizing them. So do this for me, for yourself, today—celebrate. Just like you'd celebrate a birthday or a graduation, celebrate your endless journey of self-discovery. You deserve it. You need it. We all do.
Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why?Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this youthful desolation walking up the driveway was exactly proof of that. But then Amy straightened up, glancing toward the house with a wary squint, and she seemed transformed to Isabelle, suddenly a presence to be reckoned with. Her limbs were long and even, her breasts beneath her T-shirt seemed round and right, neither large or small, only part of some pleasing symmetry; her face looked intelligent and shrewd. Isabelle, sitting motionless in her chair, felt intimidated.And angry. The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter's body that angered her. It was not the girl's unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for taken up all the space in her life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man, while she herself had not.
“Religion allies itself with auto-suggestion and psychotherapy to help man in his business activities. In the twenties one had not yet called upon God for purposes of “improving one's personality.” The best-seller in the year 1938, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, remained on a strictly secular level. What was the function of Carnegie's book at that time is the function of our greatest bestseller today, The Power of Positive Thinking by the Reverend N. V. Peale. In this religious book it is not even questioned whether our dominant concern with success is in itself in accordance with the spirit of monotheistic religion. On the contrary, this supreme aim is never doubted, but belief in God and prayer is recommended as a means to increase one's ability to be successful. Just as modern psychiatrists recommend happiness of the employee, in order to be more appealing to the customers, some ministers recommend love of God in order to be more successful. “Make God your partner”, means to make God a partner in business, rather than to become one with Him in love, justice and truth. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that he is there, he runs the show (although it would probably run without him too), you never see him, but you acknowledge his leadership while you are “doing your part.”
“For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell and having the bell keep on ringing. Sweet - who said his ideas came to him in dreams - turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets could be used to produce electricity, and wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other than the standard induction process. What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of motion. Sweet thought that if cosmic energy could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy would keep it moving.”
Once upon a time an Athenian princesss named Prokne was wed to Tereus, king of the barbarous Thracians of the north. When Prokne's unfortunate sister, Philomela, came for a visit, Tereus fell madly in love with the girl locked her away and raped her, then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone of the crime. Philomela, however, wove into a cloth the story of her misfortune. When Prokne, receiving the cloth, understood what had befallen, she freed her sister, killed her own son, Itys, whom she had borne to Tereus, and served the child up to his father at a feast--the vilest revenge she could think of. When Tereus discovered the truth, in wrath he pursued the two sisters, thinking to kill them, but the gods transformed all three into birds: Tereus into the hoopoe (a large, crested bird with a daggerlike beak), Philomela into the swallow, which can only twitter unintelligibly, and Prokne into the nightingale, which spends the night singing 'Itys Itys!' in mourning for her dead son. All these birds have reddish spots, it is said, from getting spattered with the blood of the child....It is interesting in our purposes because it shows in yet another way the great importance that clothmaking had in women's lives, becoming central to their mythology as well.
When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up.But – and here’s the catch – we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy – the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives – in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing – suddenly become ‘none of our business.
Since these wonder tales have been with us for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator, and when we disregard the narrator's intention, it is often difficult to reconstruct (and/or deconstruct) the ideological meaning of a tale. In the last analysis, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideologically conservative, sexist, progressive, emancipatory, etc., it is the celebration of wonder that constitutes its major appeal. No matter what the plot may be, this type of tale calls forth our capacity as readers and potential transmitters of its signs and meanings to wonder. We do not want to know the exact resolution, the "happily ever after," of a tale - that is, what it is actually like. We do not want to name God, gods, goddesses, or fairies, who will forever remain mysterious and omnipotent. We do not want to form graven images. We do not want utopia designated for us. We want to remain curious, startled, provoked, mystified, and uplifted. We want to glare, gaze, gawk, behold, and stare. We want to be given opportunities to change, and ultimately we want to be told that we can become kings and queens, or lords of our own destinies. We remember wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture our hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.