Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

These pages highlight our founder Dominic's subjective views on the ever-changing range and scope of subjects that Halcyon focuses on.

This is less a blog than a set of irregularly updated and often fragmentary views - on ideas and values, places and people - evolving over time into mini essais which pay humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. Our writing is provisional, always open to change as new thoughts and ideas emerge.

The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, encouraging us to embrace change and to view issues through an ever-moving series of lenses.

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in early 2020. We will be publishing extracts on this site and across social media during the first quarter of 2020. Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the book.

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 = #Acceptance: on unrequited love as a vital force http://bit.ly/1Sl7Eh0 

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on why it may pay to be pessimistic https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/on-pessimism/

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on living with the psychology of regret http://bit.ly/2ieps5l 

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16.  Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and close to 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).

Above and beyond the many unread volumes in our library, there are many other books that I'd still like to read, given sufficient life and leisure, including the following:

Reading Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and subsequently speaking with people with first-hand experience in Rwanda, makes one wonder about gradual disengagement from morality.  For example, anti-Israel sentiment can morph into anti-Jewish sentiment. Del Amitri warned 30 years ago that "they'll burn down the synagogues at six o'clock and we'll all go along like before".

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".

Azeem Azhar in conversation with Yuval Harari on how the advances in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will transform humans and human society. Fascinating - and worrying - ideas include:

The most crucial decision-making skill, some scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition.  According to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgement isn't intuition or experience or intelligence, but willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate "the art of self-overhearing".

Not quite the same thing as blogging, I feel.  A fool with a tool is still...well, let's just say that perhaps not all humans demonstrate all of the time the "floodlight intelligence" that's supposed to distinguish us from the "laser-beam" intelligence of other animals. 

Dave Pollard wrote thought-provokingly of the "Now Time”, a multidimensional recursive eternal present familiar to aboriginal cultures the world over, and recalling Friedrich Nietzche's desire to be a "yes-sayer" to each moment.

This recalls Camus' celebration of Sisyphus starting afresh each day and more recently, Eckhart Tolle's "power of now".

For the White Horse of summer, with its crown of hope made from fern and flower, has left the land. Now we must wait till the Grey Horse comes amid the dark days of winter shivering - Hookland

Even major news providers now go for niche over only mainstream publishing. Niche publishing is at the heart of what Halcyon is about. What's the point of us rehashing stories you'd have already read, often supported by high quality commentary, in the established media?

No, our way is to point you towards stories with universal appeal, whose relevance persists over time (i.e. we are not trying to be a pseudo-news broadcaster) and which touch on our deepest shared problems and possible solutions to those problems.

This way, fleas like Halcyon can compete with the elephants.

A Message by George Carlin:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.