Global Warming Is More Of A Blessing

[flaubert] Didn’t Just Hate The Railway As Such; He Hated The Way It Flattered People With The Illusion Of Progress. What Was The Point Of Scientific Advance Without Moral Advance? The Railway Would Merely Permit More People To Move About, Meet And Be Stupid Together.

When You're Young - When I Was Young - You Want Your Emotions To Be Like The Ones You Read About In Books. You Want Them To Overturn Your Life, Create And Define A New Reality. Later, I Think, You Want Them To Do Something Milder, Something More Practical: You Want Them To Support Your Life As It Is And Has Become. You Want Them To Tell You That Things Are Ok. And Is There Anything Wrong With That?

Do Not Imagine That Art Is Something Which Is Designed To Give Gentle Uplift And Self-confidence . Art Is Not A Brassiere. At Least, Not In The English Sense. But Do Not Forget That Brassiere Is The French Word For Life-jacket.

When You Read A Great Book, You Don’t Escape From Life, You Plunge Deeper Into It. There May Be A Superficial Escape – Into Different Countries, Mores, Speech Patterns – But What You Are Essentially Doing Is Furthering Your Understanding Of Life’s Subtleties, Paradoxes, Joys, Pains And Truths. Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic.

I'm Interested In Such Things As The Difference Between How We Perceive The World And What The World Turns Out To Be. The Difference Is Between The Stories We Tell Others And The Stories We Tell Ourselves. There Is A Wonderful Russian Saying, Which I Use As The Epigraph Of One Of My Novels, Which Goes, He Lies Like An Eyewitness. Which Is Very Sly, Clever And True.