On Dante
Is it possible to appreciate fully Dante’s work without understanding the man himself and the society in which he lived? A recent book attempted to shed new light on what some have called the greatest of all European poems.
See also:
Love
On Legacy
Halcyon Inspired
1 October 2020
In the last months of his life, a physically weakened Christopher Hitchens travelled to the Texas Freethought Convention and while there, an eight-year-old girl asked Hitchens what books she should consider reading. Intrigued, Hitchens spent 15 minutes chatting with the youngster and sketching out a reading list (below). His last words to her? "Lots of love...remember the love bit..."
On Poetry
Halcyon In Kal…
30 September 2020
I share below (without comment...which is a personal act that belongs in the real, not the virtual world), an evolving, far from exhaustive, but from an emotional point-of-view, highly illustrative and authentic selection of my favourite poetry and lyrics...
When I loved you
And you loved me,
You were the sea,
The sky, the tree.
Now skies are skies,
And seas are seas,
And trees are brown
And they are trees.
----------
On Leonard Cohen
So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear
On Love
At least until the transhumanist dream becomes a reality, which according to one leading modern philosopher may be never, we will cling on to whatever we can that reminds us of our loved ones.
What's New? - Love
Halcyon curates the most significant love-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with love-related challenges.
On living your life
Children’s book illustrator and Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, in an NPR Fresh Air interview less than a year before his death in 2012, made a heartwarming call to "live your life, live your life, live your life".
What's Changing? - Presence
Halcyon Inspired
30 June 2019
Please see below selected recent presence-related change.
See also:
October 2018
- One of the dangers of emotional life, notes The School of Life, is that we find that we don't feel 'in the moment': we're at a funeral, but we don't feel sad. We're making love, but our minds are elsewhere. It's our birthday, but we're not jolly. Why is it sometimes so hard for our true inner feelings to keep pace with events in the outer world?
September 2018
On Xenophilia
Halcyon In Kal…
2 August 2018
During these dark days of worsening refugee crises, can we still imagine reaching a state of "xenophilia"...overcoming our "homophily", i.e. the love of that which is like us, and reaching the love of that which is different?
Indeed, if we're ever going to care enough about conflict, genocide, poverty, hunger etc. enough to act on them properly, then we need to try much harder to avoid conflict with people we might not yet fully understand.