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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Literature

On Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

 

I guess I've been aware of Walt Whitman as an American national icon since I was at university, and have long admired what I may be his most famous poem, I Sing the Body Electric.

It's probably been said many times before, and much more profoundly, and studied and dissected, but the poet's words do indeed seem to crackle with electricity, with vitality, with what Robert Pirsig called in Lila, "dynamic quality". This is a celebration of connecting, of being alive.

"Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve; 

They shall be stript, that you may see them. 

On Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Halcyon In Kal… 31 December 2018

 

Though not particularly taken by recent film adaptations of her novels, and well-used to my family calling me "Mr Bennett", I remember very much enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read it as a student in France.

Today, Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different, believes The School of Life. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.

On World Literature
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Halcyon In Kal… 14 April 2016

The multimedia series, Invitation to World Literature, offers an interactive journey through 13 classic works from a range of eras, places, cultures, languages, and traditions

On Echoes Halcyon In Kal… 20 June 2013

Researchers have unearthed what are probably the only surviving recordings of the voices of Virginia Woolf, from 50 years earlier, of Alexander Graham Bell (below) and from a quarter of a century earlier still, perhaps the oldest sound recording of all, French schoolchildren singing Au clair de la lune.