The Fall of Arthur
by J R R Tolkien.
A nice reading in verse about Artur's last battle.
wan horsemen wild in windy clouds
grey and monstrous grimly riding
shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous.
Yes J R R Tolkien the storm is coming,
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The Fall of Arthur
by J R R Tolkien.
A nice reading in verse about Artur's last battle.
wan horsemen wild in windy clouds
grey and monstrous grimly riding
shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous.
Yes J R R Tolkien the storm is coming,
I am rereading "Os Insubmissos" (The Unruly) the book of Urbano Tavares Rodrigues that died today, I don't know if there are translations from this author in English language.
He died at the age of 89 years, (Lisbon, 6th of December of 1923 — Lisbon, 9 of August of 2013), He was a Portuguese professor of literature, a literary critic and a fiction writer, winner of many literary prizes. He was born in 1923 in Lisbon, Portugal, but spent most of his childhood near Moura, in Alentejo, the Southern region of Portugal.
Among the numerous awards that dedicated their work include the Literary Life from the Portuguese Writers Association (in 2003), the premium Fernando Namora and Ricardo Malheiros, Academy of Sciences awarded the "Uma Pedrada no Charco" - "A Stoned in Pond".
He was a great Portuguese writer and as many writers of his generation (like Jose Saramago the Nobel Prize of Literature) he was connected to the Communist Party, one inheritance from the time of the Portuguese dictatorship,
"Cabo da Boa Esperança"
"O navio está na praia, naufragado,
Esquecido das ondas, do bulício dos portos;
Algas e conchas cobrem-lhe o costado
- As flores dos navios mortos.
Senhores de austera compostura
Dizem-no, ao vê-lo apodrecer,
A negação do Longe, do Mistério, da Aventura;
Sinal de todo o impossível querer.
Mas não sabem que, à noite, o rapazio,
Junto ao costado poluído vem sonhar
As linha ideais de um outro navio,
Em busca de outra praias, em busca de outro mar."
A M Couto Viana
"Cape of Good Hope"
"The ship is on the beach, shipwrecked,
From the waves and the hustle and bustle of the ports forgotten;
Algae and shells covering his side
- The flowers of dead ships.
Lords of austere composure
They tell, seeing it rot
It is the denying of the Far, the Mystery, the Adventure;
Signal of all wanting the impossible.
But they don't know that at night the jig.
Along the polluted side come to dream
The ideal line of another ship,
In search of other beaches in search of other seas ".
A M Couto Viana
Rereading some parts of The Iliad and The Odyssey from Homer a very good book
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. . . .
A melhor homenagem a um poeta
É decorar-lhe os versos
The best tribute to a poet
It is memorizing his verses
Very crazy Duke
Letters from a Stoic (Penguin Classics) by Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Robin Campbell (Jul 30, 1969)
Stoicism, as expressed in the Letters, helped ease pagan Rome's transition to Christianity, for it upholds upright ethical ideals and extols virtuous living.
Al this knowledge, extracted from Epistulae Morales, you can buy for £8.99 with the translation and introduction from Robin Campbell.
Very Good Reading.
http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/...442106,00.html
I am reading The first Volume of "Mother Earth (magazine)" a grouping oriented anarchist magazine edited in 1907 to 1915 in the United States.
It is not updated and sometimes is quite boring but have some articles of major value including women's emancipation, sexual freedom and birth control. There many articles signed for people of the Social Science, Education and Art, It has some very interesting ideas we are debating now (again). The world is round and we keep spinning.
In August of 1917 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, and were deported. The subscription lists of Mother Earth and The Blast (another anarchist magazine), which contain 10,000 names, were seized for the government to act against those citizens under the Espionage Act.
Some stories are quite dramatic about people that the only crime was to have signed a magazine.
Between many others I chose a passage that seemed interesting to me:
"Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it."
A small passage remembering "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" of Milan Kundera.
Books are like women, we only return if there is a quote or a moment that makes us to return once more.
I have been returning to "L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être" (the French and first version of the book) since 1984.
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
“There is no perfection only life”
“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I am reading a Portuguese Poet that I don't think has been ever translated to English. Well it is a real pity most of his verses are very good in spite he couldn't write but some did it for him.
Sem que o discurso eu pedisse,
Ele falou; e eu escutei.
Gostei do que ele não disse;
Do que disse não gostei.
Tu, que tanto prometeste
Enquanto nada podias,
Hoje que podes – esqueceste
Tudo quanto prometias…
Chegasses onde pudesses;
Mas nunca devias rir
Nem fingir que não conheces
Quem te ajudou a subir!
Without my asking the speech.
He spoke, and I listened.
I liked what he didnt say,
I did not like what he said.
You, who promised so much
While you could nothing,
Today you can - and forgotten
Everything your promised ...
Might you arrive where you could;
But you should never laugh
Or pretend not to know
Who helped you to climb!
The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.
GAO XINGJIAN, Nobel Lecture, 2000
One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain, this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the same grace and beauty.Quote:
Originally Posted by Duke of Buckingham
In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.
What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.
One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.
Fluid Mechanics from Frank M. White for my PhD.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity from B. F. Skinner.
Free will and the moral autonomy of the individual and much more in a a technology of behavior book ...
The Corpus Aristotelicum is the collection of Aristotle's works that have survived from antiquity through Medieval manuscript transmission. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school. Reference to them is made according to the organization of Immanuel Bekker's nineteenth-century edition, which in turn is based on ancient classifications of these works.
http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Re.../dp/8772895853
http://i.brainyquote.com/photos/a/aristotle133079.jpg
Milan Kundera - Immortality
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/m...0_1008903c.jpg
. . . She walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn't control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name.
Milan Kundera (Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; born 1 April 1929) is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer. Of Czech origin, he has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores."
Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.
I am reading a Portuguese book about Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, a most interesting philosopher from ancient Greece.
In 500 BC, this man was the most revolutionary and as punishment for is crazy ideas, he fled to Lampsacus due to a backlash against his pupil Pericles. The man considered that the moon was a piece of the earth that for some reason separated and the sun was a very hot big piece of iron.
A very good reading.
I made a search and found this for you:
Anaxagoras, the son of Hegesibulus or Eubulus, was a native of Clazomenae. He was a pupil of Anaximenes, and was the first who set mind above matter, for at the beginning of his treatise, which is composed in attractive and dignified language, he says, "All things were together; then came Mind and set them in order." This earned for Anaxagoras himself the nickname of Nous or Mind, and Timon in his Silli says of him:
Then, I ween, there is Anaxagoras, a doughty champion, whom they call Mind, because forsooth his was the mind which suddenly woke up and fitted closely together all that had formerly been in a medley of confusion.
He was eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations. For, when they accused him of neglecting it, he replied, "Why then do you not look after it?" And at last he went into retirement and engaged in physical investigation without troubling himself about public affairs. When some one inquired, "Have you no concern in your native land?" "Gently," he replied, "I am greatly concerned with my fatherland," and pointed to the sky.
He is said to have been twenty years old at the invasion of Xerxes and to have lived seventy-two years. Apollodorus in his Chronology says that he was born in the 70th Olympiad,] and died in the first year of the 88th Olympiad. He began to study philosophy at Athens in the archonship of Callias when he was twenty; Demetrius of Phalerum states this in his list of archons; and at Athens they say he remained for thirty years.
He declared the sun to be a mass of red-hot metal and to be larger than the Peloponnesus, though others ascribe this view to Tantalus; he declared that there were dwellings on the moon, and moreover hills and ravines. He took as his principles the homoeomeries or homogeneous molecules; for just as gold consists of fine particles which are called gold-dust, so he held the whole universe to be compounded of minute bodies having parts homogeneous to themselves. His moving principle was Mind; of bodies, he said, some, like earth, were heavy, occupying the region below, others, light like fire, held the region above, while water and air were intermediate in position. For in this way over the earth, which is flat, the sea sinks down after the moisture has been evaporated by the sun. In the beginning the stars moved in the sky as in a revolving dome, so that the celestial pole which is always visible was vertically overhead; but subsequently the pole took its inclined position. He held the Milky Way to be a reflection of the light of stars which are not shone upon by the sun; comets to be a conjunction of planets which emit flames; shooting-stars to be a sort of sparks thrown off by the air. He held that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun's heat; that thunder is a clashing together of the clouds, lightning their violent friction; an earthquake a subsidence of air into the earth.
Animals were produced from moisture, heat, and an earthy substance; later the species were propagated by generation from one another, males from the right side, females from the left.
There is a story that he predicted the fall of the meteoric stone at Aegospotami, which he said would fall from the sun. Hence Euripides, who was his pupil, in the Phathon calls the sun itself a "golden clod." Furthermore, when he went to Olympia, he sat down wrapped in a sheep-skin cloak as if it were going to rain; and the rain came. When some one asked him if the hills at Lampsacus would ever become sea, he replied, "Yes, it only needs time." Being asked to what end he had been born, he replied, "To study sun and moon and heavens." To one who inquired, "You miss the society of the Athenians?" his reply was, "Not I, but they miss mine." When he saw the tomb of Mausolus, he said, "A costly tomb is an image of an estate turned into stone." To one who complained that he was dying in a foreign land, his answer was, "The descent to Hades is much the same from whatever place we start."
Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History says Anaxagoras was the first to maintain that Homer in his poems treats of virtue and justice, and that this thesis was defended at greater length by his friend Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who was the first to busy himself with Homer's physical doctrine. Anaxagoras was also the first to publish a book with diagrams. Silenus in the first book of his History gives the archonship of Demylus as the date when the meteoric stone fell, and says that Anaxagoras declared the whole firmament to be made of stones; that the rapidity of rotation caused it to cohere; and that if this were relaxed it would fall.
Of the trial of Anaxagoras different accounts are given. Sotion in his Succession of the Philosophers says that he was indicted by Cleon on a charge of impiety, because he declared the sun to be a mass of red-hot metal; that his pupil Pericles defended him, and he was fined five talents and banished. Satyrus in his Lives says that the prosecutor was Thucydides, the opponent of Pericles, and the charge one of treasonable correspondence with Persia as well as of impiety; and that sentence of death was passed on Anaxagoras by default. When news was brought him that he was condemned and his sons were dead, his comment on the sentence was, "Long ago nature condemned both my judges and myself to death"; and on his sons, "I knew that my children were born to die." Some, however, tell this story of Solon, and others of Xenophon. That he buried his sons with his own hands is asserted by Demetrius of Phalerum in his work On Old Age. Hermippus in his Lives says that he was confined in the prison pending his execution; that Pericles came forward and asked the people whether they had any fault to find with him in his own public career; to which they replied that they had not. "Well," he continued, "I am a pupil of Anaxagoras; do not then be carried away by slanders and put him to death. Let me prevail upon you to release him." So he was released; but he could not brook the indignity he had suffered and committed suicide. Hieronymus in the second book of his Scattered Notes states that Pericles brought him into court so weak and wasted from illness that he owed his acquittal not so much to the merits of his case as to the sympathy of the judges. So much then on the subject of his trial.
He was supposed to have borne Democritus a grudge because he had failed to get into communication with him.At length he retired to Lampsacus and there died. And when the magistrates of the city asked if there was anything he would like done for him, he replied that he would like them to grant an annual holiday to the boys in the month in which he died; and the custom is kept up to this day. 15. So, when he died, the people of Lampsacus gave him honourable burial and placed over his grave the following inscription:
Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest
Of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest.
I also have written an epigram upon him:
The sun's a molten mass,
Quoth Anaxagoras;
This is his crime, his life must pay the price.
Pericles from that fate
Rescued his friend too late;
His spirit crushed, by his own hand he dies.
There have been three other men who bore the name of Anaxagoras [of whom no other writer gives a complete list]. The first was a rhetorician of the school of Isocrates; the second a sculptor, mentioned by Antigonus; the third a grammarian, pupil of Zenodotus.
Lye and turn your problems part of your future. The truth will make your problems part of your past.
Ric
I am rereading Animal Farm by George Orwell, a nice light book.
Tired of their servitude to man, a group of farm animals revolt and establish their own society, only to be betrayed into worse servitude by their leaders, the pigs, whose slogan becomes: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." This 1945 satire addresses the socialist/ communist philosophy of Stalin in the Soviet Union.
As well as many aspects of modern society...Quote:
Originally Posted by Duke of Buckingham
Quote:
Originally Posted by zombie67
We are so few fighting for freedom and freedom is our best asset.
For most of the human race it is not their problem to fight for anything, it is enough (they think) to vote once in a while. Liberty is a prominent question in philosophy, at least my philosophy.
We more than often trust on our leaders with disastrous results, "The fish forget each other." from Prince of Huai Nan is a good text on human conduct (because men shouldn't forget each other). Our liberty is achieved by defending others freedom.
This idea of liberty leads us to another fundamental thought, viz., that of forgetfulness. This is expressed by the fishes forgetting each other. Thus, the True Man, standing firmly on a spiritual foundation, the basis of Heaven and Earth, his centre, or heart, moving freely in this sphere, is possessed of the fulness of virtues, and is warmed by the rays of harmony. Naturally all things become full of the vividness of life's happiness. In that case, who would be willing to change that state for one full of perplexity and complexity, arising from the intrusion of desire and passion, selfishness, ambition, pride and so on?
Man I write too much, sorry for that Z. :((
One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel García Márquez.
The widely acclaimed book, considered by many to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 20 million copies. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.
A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe
By Christian Meier
Oxford University Press
Published 22 September 2011
With Fire and Sword (Polish: Ogniem i mieczem) is a historical novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz (also the author of QUO VADIS), published in 1884. It is the first volume of a series known to Poles as the Trilogy, followed by The Deluge (Potop, 1886) and Fire in the Steppe (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1888), also translated as Colonel Wolodyjowski. The novel has been adapted as a film several times, most recently in 1999.
With Fire and Sword is a historical fiction novel, set in the 17th century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. It was initially serialized in several Polish newspapers, chapters appearing in weekly instalments. It gained enormous popularity in Poland, and by the turn of the 20th century had become one of the most popular Polish books ever. It became obligatory reading in Polish schools, and has been translated into English and most European languages.
The series was a vehicle for expressing Polish patriotism in a Poland partitioned and deprived of independence, while avoiding censorship by having a historical background concerning wars with past enemies other than the countries ruling parts of Poland at the time of writing (Russia, Germany and Austria).
The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade ?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Decision in the Ukraine - Summer 1943
II SS and II Panzerkorps
by Nipe
and
Panzertaktik
German Small Unit Armor Tactics
Wolfgang Schneider
I am tasting the words in my mother language of the most important writer for me. I am rereading Fernando Pessoa, on his Book of Disquiet. I would like the words were mine but then I face me and think what are the words that have never been said ...
From me to you, some quotes of this work of art, I hope you like it:
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.
Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,
I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.
I was never convinced of what I believed in.
I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.
Words were my only truth.
When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.”
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows….. I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature stimulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
“Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”
“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”
“What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Disqu.../dp/0141183047
I am rereading "Os Lusíadas", usually translated as "The Lusiads", is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões (sometimes anglicized as Camoens).
Written in Homeric fashion, the poem focuses mainly on a fantastical interpretation of the Portuguese voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries. Os Lusíadas is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much in the way as Virgil's Aeneid was for the Ancient Romans, as well as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks. It was first printed in 1572, three years after the author returned from the Indies.
I don't think I can translate that, even the several English translations, are so different and none seems to be adequate to the greatness of the poem. I know that most of the Portuguese can't understand the poem due to the use of Archaic Portuguese and to several figure of speech.
As I was browsing I found in amazon what appears to be a well informed commentary about this issue, which I will quote:
"Had Camoens been "Englishened" shortly after his own lifetime, no doubt some English translator could have grasped the proper tone, meter and spirit for his work to be presented in English grab. However, since he died in 1580, just when Spain absorbed Portugal into the Iberian Union, his poem in praise of the Portuguese exploits in India was not to be Englishened when the English where busy trying to undone what he had praised. Therefore he lost his chance with the English language. As it is, all English translation of Camoens have been at best exercises in creative anachronism (such as Richard Francis Burton's Victorian one) or simply inadequate (such as the Penguin trans., which is _in prose_!). Also, there is the problem that a translation of the high degree required is best achieved between cognate languages (such as the German trans. of Shakespeare, or the Portuguese trans. of the D.Quixote). Be as it is,Camoens didn't fail to attract the attention even of Marx & Engels, who quote the opening section of the Lusiads (in Portuguese) in the _German Ideology_. Therefore I advise reading _any_ English trans., but only to get a foretaste before learning Portuguese and reading the original.Finally, for those who think the poem's "hero" Vasco da Gama to be unintersting: the hero of the poem is the Portuguese people in general, therefore the name of the poem - the _Lusiads_ (from Lusitania, i.e. Portugal) and not the "Gamaeid"."-C. E. R. Mendonça "Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça"
Well I am reading it again.
Reading articles, thesis, reports about gas-lift technology. It will be my main PhD subject.
Your turn to do so Carlos. I will light your life with some nice images from gas-lift technology:Quote:
Originally Posted by pinhodecarlos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3npUD2cV8k
Foundation and Empire a novel written by Isaac Asimov.
I am reading the first half of the book, titled "The General", tells how the experienced General Bel Riose of the Galactic Empire launches an attack against the Foundation ...
I would make one very good movie of the series Foundation and Empire, the book as everything to be a good movie or TV series.
The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. Unsurpassed for their unique blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women to preserve humanity's light against an inexorable tide of darkness and violence.
I am rereading "The Republic of Plato".
“In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.”
― Plato, Plato's Republic: The Theatre of the Mind
“The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”
― Plato, Plato's Republic
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
― Plato, The Republic
Paper: A numerical model of slug flow in vertical tubes.
That seems interesting ... by the way what does that mean?:confused:
Sorry for my ignorance pinhodecarlos.:((
Give me a quick explanation about it ... b-(
When you are drilling a well the structure can be horizontal, inclined or vertical. In real life you have the three. On my PhD I will be concerned about the vertical tubes and what happens to the multiphase flows when they come up, liquid and gas. While they come up different types of flows and patterns can happen, the flow can be bubbly, slug, churn or annular. I will concentrate my effort on the transition from bubbly flow to slug flow of vertical tubes with gas-lift technique. This technique ensures by injecting a gas to increase the well production and therefore new numeric models and experiences on a real set-up are necessary to predict the production of the well and also to be sure when the various flows transitions will happen and to calculate a bunch of stuff (fraction void, velocities, flow rate, pressure, etc), so that the mechanical parts of the drilling wells don't get breakdown.
So I am reading a bunch of papers on this area.
I am trying to read MY COMPUTER and that is not easy, I start to think this computer is a female because is so difficult to understand ...
maybe in the end, it will be as a woman and give much more than it asks ...
But somehow is fun and challeging ... as a book ... as woman.
I am going to read it and read it and read it ... because there is a passage that makes me come back once more.
http://fe.epaentretenimento.com/wp-c...apaixonado.gif
I am reading "Walden II", that is a scientific fiction book writen by Burrhus Frederic Skinner in 1948.
The book suggests us to use our knowledge about human behavior to create a social environment where we will take productive and creative lives without compromising the possibilities of those who will follow us, so they can do the same.
It is a good social study with no compromise with the science itself, maybe better it is a study about how B. F. Skinner brain started to construct his experimental analysis of behavior.
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Евгений Замятин, Clarence Brown
A masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.
A book about the discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and much about that disease the ancients called the soul.
A good book, not that I agree with much of it but it is a different point of view in a different world on another time.
I am with a very bad flu so I am reading "The Flu" by Jacqueline Druga.
In 1918 forty million people succumbed to a particular strain of swine flu. It appeared out of nowhere, and just as quickly as it surfaced, the Spanish Flu vanished. Gone for good. Or so we thought. Though mankind has anticipated its resurfacing for some time, mankind is ill prepared. Mutated and with a vengeance, the Spanish Flu returns.
Better that you read it to know more ...
Knocked out: On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace - Donald Kagan
In my nose: Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy - James Fallows
On deck: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Incredibly recommended from last year: The Son - Philipp Meyer
Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Seth Shostak. He is the lead Astronomer at the SETI Institute. :)