Living Artfully

Svevo Brooks has produced a charming and simple book, The Art of Good Living. It is no easy task to accomplish the simple. This book subtitled "Simple Steps to Regaining Health and the Joy of Life" does that. Brooks covers five areas:

elimination
relaxation
happiness
sleep
flexibility

It is a listing that can tumble. That is, the elements can be shuffled in any order of priority. You don't have to start at the beginning. It is important to realize that my short list doesn't correspond verbatim to the table of contents in The Art of Good Living. Take for example, the chapter on elimination, it is called "Good Housekeeping". In other words, there is a lot of charm at work.

And so for day 700
12.11.2008

Roaming Conclusions

In the final section "Conclusions" of the anthology of selections and commentary entitled Texts and Pretexts (1932) Aldous Huxley invites us to consider last thoughts

Or if we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. People will accept certain theological statements about life and the world, will elect to perform certain rites and to follow certain rules of conduct, not because they imagine the statements to be true or the rules and rites to be divinely dictated, but simply because they have discovered experimentally that to live in a certain ritual rhythm, under certain ethical restraints, and as if certain metaphysical doctrines were true, is to live nobly, with style. Every art has its conventions which every artist must accept. The greatest, the most important of the arts is living.

I find it conducive to philosophical musings to juxtapose the above with an excerpt from the Henry Vaughan poem collected under the heading of "Amor Fati"

   Man hath still either toys or care :
But hath no root, nor to one place is tied,
But ever restless and irregular,
   About this earth doth run and ride.
He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where ;
   He says it is so far,
That he has quite forgot how to go there.

Religion as toy for the homeless? Being at home in the world is to be without religion?

And so for day 503
29.04.2008

Designing for Mutability

The imperative is identified.

the need to make design as fluid as possible so that it can pour across the wires into the unpredictable receptacles, rhythms, and ultimately the lives of others.

Alan Liu is here referencing material accessed through the Web. What he here describes in The Laws of Cool can also be valid if in a more limited sense for print and television. The key is the accommodation of rhythm. And this design principle can even be extended to theatre hacking by Olivier Choinière or imagine a stroll through the Oakville Galleries in the Gariloch Gardens with the Janet Cardiff's A Large Slow River (2000). Life presents us with opportunities to resize, delay, pause, in short mashable moments, and as the description of the Cardiff piece says "Our attention is fixed on listening and imagining. Synchronistic events also play with our understanding of reality as events and scenes described on her CD coincidentally come together in the physical world." And as any meditator can tell you — sounds occur in one's head often unbidden.

And so for day 347
26.11.2007