I just learned a very good word.
Eudaimonia means “human flourishing” in Greek. I learned it from Alain de Botton, who wrote about how the the study of “The Art of Travel” (the title of his book on the subject) could contribute to it.
I like the concept of eudaimonia – the idea of a world set up for humans to be the most/best/happiest/most competent that they can be – and I like also the idea of studying something so as to contribute to it :)
A few months back, I blogged about Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story. Imagine my joy when I chanced upon an article on Wired.com in which the editors got some sci-fi luminaries to write six-word stories!
Here are my favourites:
Longed for him. Got him. Shit. – Margaret Atwood
Lie detector eyeglasses perfected. Civilisation collapses. – Richard Powers
I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss…? – Neil Gaiman
He read his obituary with confusion. – Steven Meretzky
Today’s Internet meanderings brought me this beauty – a six-word short story, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway’s wikipedia entry (scroll way way down):
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
Late one night, when I was just about to fall asleep, my sister came bounding in to my room, and showed me a piece of paper. On it were examples of quite hilarious writing. Thought I’d share them with you :)
1. Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
2. Her vocabulary was as bad as like, whatever.
3. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and I’ve always liked to write, so I read some of the winning works. Then I discovered the Pulitzer Prizes web site, and discovered this very moving story, a winning work from 2006 about a US Marine major “who helps the families of comrades killed in Iraq cope with their loss”.
Reading it, even in a totally removed situation, I couldn’t help crying.
So I thought this quote was interesting:
“The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.” – the guest, “Toward Winter”, Yasunari Kawabata, 1926
My folks got married on 8 Sep thirty years ago, and tomorrow they are going away for a few days all by themselves.
Thirty years ago, like it was this year, 8 Sep was the fifteenth day of the lunar month, and the moon was round and round.
