Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
This week I spent a lot of time wandering around New York city, exploring neighborhoods and catching up with the exhibitions I never have time to go to. If I had to describe New York in a paradox I would say it is a city of symphonic noise. Somehow, the chaos of car honking, construction work and the screeching sound of the subway comes together into something unexpectedly harmonious.
Until next week,
Florian
A Museum of Words
As a kid, I wrote passages from my favorite books on the wall above my bed. I wanted to keep them close, somewhere I could revisit them. They’d be the last thing I’d see before switching off the light.
Of all the arts, writing is the only one that is never on display. We have museums for painting, concerts for music, streets for architecture. But the written word has no stage. It is kept out of sight between the front and back cover of a book.
What if we treated words like other forms of art?
Imagine walking in a wide room but instead of Van Gogh, Pollock or O’Keeffe hanging on the walls, you’re surrounded by pages of books.
As you get closer, you notice some passages have been underlined. “Who highlighted these sentences?” you ask the gallery attendant. “Everyone”, she answers. What you’re looking at are the fragments of a page that were highlighted the most. The shape of thoughts with universal resonance.
There’s no caption to tell you who the authors are. Stripping out authorship helps you connect with an idea in its purest form.
Some pages have scribbles on the sides. The marks of people’s enthusiastic reactions or strong disagreement. They remind you that no idea is an island. Each one is a seed that grows into the mind of the reader.
As you walk out, you think of all those beautiful musings locked inside of books. You grab a pencil and write one down for everyone to see.
Weekly Wisdom
✍ On Writing: This short piece by Paul Graham is a gold mine of wisdom about writing. My favorite: “expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it”.
🌸 Poem of the Week: I stumbled upon this lovely poem by Brian Bilston. As I later found out, this is not his real name. He’s been described as “the Poet Laureate of Twitter” and seems to want his real identity to remain “clouded in the pipe smoke of mystery” as we learn from his website’s biography.
🧑🎨 Drift: My favorite type of art is the one that makes you think. This week I went to see “Drift - Fragile Futures” at the Shed. The part which struck me the most was the artists representation of objects deconstructed into the materials that go into making them.
Lateral Thought
One day a man of the people said to Zen master Ikkyu: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?” Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.” “Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?” Ikkyu then wrote twice running: “Attention. Attention”
“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written.” Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running:
“Attention. Attention. Attention” Half angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean anyway?” And Ikkyu answered gently: “Attention means attention.”Philip Kapleau
It has been some years since I ambled along the streets of NYC...and yes it is a symphony of cacophony...but it is also a visual symphony, that moving of humanity moving in all directions at the same time. The problem I see with having pages on the wall is unfortunate....most bipeds walk by with a quick glance and say....interesting.