A true Renaissance Man long before the Renaissance
Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Abu'l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām Nīshāpūrī was a Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.
(From Wikipedia: http://goo.gl/bI7k)
Here are a few choice excerpts from the Edward FitzGerald translation:
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám
Text of the First Edition
16
Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
21
Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silent to Rest.
23
Ah, make the most of what we may yet spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and -- sans End!
25
Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd
Of the Two worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.
26
Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Thomas Kang
Got troubles with menopause, skin irritation, or blood sugar? This is said to help. Many Koreans enjoy 둥굴레차 (doong-gul-lae-cha), or doonggullae tea, by boiling the dried roots. I have skin allergies, and my blood sugar is on the high side; I don't know how much this helps, but I just enjoy the taste of the tea, whatever its purported effects. I suppose the tea is doing something, since I haven't had to worry about menopause at all.
Rather than drink plain-tasting water (which, in my opinion, tastes like water), I like to boil up a huge pot of 둥굴레차, then keep in in the fridge to drink with meals. 보리차 (bori cha, or barley tea) and 옥수수차 (oksusu cha, or corn tea) using roasted grains are similar-tasting alternatives, but 둥굴레차 has a richer, "creamier" taste, with as much of the roasted goodness.
I thought I'd post this in response to the wonderful and informative post on Solomon's Seal by +nomad dimitri the other day here:
http://goo.gl/TkU90
Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970): The Conquest of Happiness
Quotes and pictures
I thought I'd put together some nice quotes from the book, along with some pictures of a truly brilliant, wise, and compassionate man of letters.
To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilization; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. To prevent the perpetuation of poverty is necessary if the benefits of machine production are to accrue in any degree to those most in need of them; but what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 1
Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 6
No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 8
The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure. The former kind of surprise is pleasant, the latter unpleasant. It is therefore wise to be not unduly conceited.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 10
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 10
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 10
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 11
A too powerful ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the world to the full. A capacity for genuine affection is one of the marks of the man who has escaped from this prison of self.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 12
For my own part, speaking personally, I have found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have experienced.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 13
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 13
Some people are unable to bear with patience even those minor troubles which make up, if we permit them to do so, a very large part of life. They are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and vow vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes fail to return from the sanitary stream laundry. The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires. The wise man fails to observe the dust that the housemaid has not dusted, the potato that the cook has not cooked, and the soot that the sweep has not swept. I do not mean that he takes no steps to remedy these matters, provided he has time to do so; I only mean that he deals with them without emotion. Worry and fret and irritation are emotions which serve no purpose.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 16
The man who has become emancipated fromt he empire of worry will find life a much more cheerful affair than it used to be while he was perpetually being irritated. Personal idiosyncracies of acquaintances, which formerly made him wish to scream, will now seem merely amusing.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 16
The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and is not felt to be so by the recipient.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 17
The happy man . . . feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.
- The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 17
One last question: Suppose, Lord Russell, that this film will be looked at by our descendants, like the Dead Sea scroll, in a thousand years' time. What would you think it's worth telling that generation about the life you've lived and the lessons you've learned from it?
I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more closely and closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way; if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
- Interview of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher and mathematician and Nobel laureate, on BBC's Face to Face (1959)
I picked up this set of little cacti, along with the wood stand, while taking a drive near our place last weekend.
As I was trying to figure out the answer to +nomad dimitri's picture riddle (http://goo.gl/TkU90), I thought I would take a pic of these dried dandelion flower heads, which sit in a jar in our cupboard awaiting their next incarnation as tea.
Earlier this morning (actually late last night), I did a quick post on Adam Johnson's 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning The Orphan Master's Son, an adventurous, sad, rollicking tale set in North Korea (http://goo.gl/mqaPL). In it, there is a famous North Korean actress named Sun Moon, who is so pure that she doesn't even know that some people eat flowers for food. Jun Do, the tunnel-digging, kidnapping and murdering protagonist, has a tattoo of Sun Moon on his chest. He eventually becomes Sun Moon's replacement husband, and at one point he forces her to eat a flower, presumably in hopes of foisting a kind of epiphany upon her.
Dried dandelion is not really my cup of tea, but now that I'm nearing the end of the story, I thought I would eat one of the flower buds in Jun Do's and Sun Moon's honor (knowing that this does not suffice in recognizing the plight of hungry and oppressed North Koreans).
As I was uploading the pic, I noticed that the flower petals and heads are reminiscent of Van Gogh's brushstrokes. Now that I think of it, for a Paul Bunyon type dried sunflower heads would be the equivalent of dried dandelion heads for me.
Here are a few other interesting findings along the way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraxacum
The Latin name Taraxacum originates in medieval Persian writings on pharmacy. The Persian scientist Al-Razi around 900 (A.D.) wrote "the tarashaquq is like chicory". The Persian scientist and philosopher Ibn Sīnā around 1000 (A.D.) wrote a book chapter on Taraxacum. Gerard of Cremona, in translating Arabic to Latin around 1170, spelled it tarasacon.
The English name, dandelion, is a corruption of the French dent de lion, meaning "lion's tooth", referring to the coarsely toothed leaves. The plant is also known as . . . . other common names include . . . white endive, and wild endive.
In Turkish, the dandelion is called karahindiba meaning "black endive or chicory".
This recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I'm almost at the end and have been enjoying it quite a bit. Here is a nice review from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/17/orphan-masters-son-adam-johnson-review
May 6, 2013 | A beautiful documentary about one family's determination to survive on the coast of Sri Lanka.
This is quite a poignant video short. As I get older, I feel as if I have a better understanding of our connection with nature, but it's still very hard to express it in words.
I was planning on rereading The Old Man and the Sea later this month, so this is a nice primer. While I'm at it, I may as well reread The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Via The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/275472/fishing-after-the-tsunami/
http://vimeo.com/65052872
Also via The Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2012/02/the-boxing-cats-1894/253134/
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/video/2012/02/15/motion_study_cat.jpg
This may be my first cat video.
Via The Smithsonian (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/video/Thomas-Edisons-Boxing-Cats.html) and The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/253134/the-oldest-cat-video-of-all-time/).