We learn 25% from our teacher, 25% from experience, 25% from our friends, and 25% from time #WitchOfPortobello
– Text of a tweet by @paulocoelho, which I read to mean that the quote is from Paulo Coelho’s book The Witch of Portobello. I had come to know about Paulo Coelho through The Alchemist and Veronika Decides to Die. After I typed out the text of the quote, it struck me that saying that we learn 25% from experience and 25% from time was repetitive; but then I thought, was it? Learning from experience could learning from doing something or being affected by some event; learning from time, on the other hand, need not – the passing of time itself may convey some lessons…
In the frosty gloom of Dec. 30, as a hissing wind spun litter through the air, the Maltz company had among its cars a 2011 Mustang convertible, multiple Mercedes-Benzes, two cars that didn’t even run and George Bell’s 2005 Toyota.
– The start of a paragraph from N R Kornfeld’s The Lonely Death of George Bell, published in The New York Times on 17 October 2016. The story is about the leavings of a man who died alone, in New York City. You can hear the wind hiss and see the litter being spun.
China may not yet be a great power but it has already acquired great power autism.
– A sentence from the highlights of a conference organised by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on China. To this layman, the metaphor of “great power autism” – autism being a condition characterised by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people – seems so apt.
Sharon sounded prepared to be bored.
– A line about a tone I could so readily imagine, from Ovidia Yu‘s Aunty Lee’s Deadly Delights, Aunty Lee being a latter-day counterpart to and hybrid of Miss Marple (her well-intentioned social interventions) and Nero Wolfe (her being a gourmand).
“What was truly surprising for me,” Donahue said, “was going into a space that was ancient, and to crawl around the ceiling and look at the walls and realize that they were looking at things acoustically. It wasn’t just about the architecture. They had these big jugs that were put up there to sip certain frequencies out of the air … They built diffusion, a way to break up the sound waves by putting striations in the walls. They were actively trying to tune the space.”
– A quote from Adrienne LaFrance’s Hearing the Lost Sounds of Antiquity, published in The Atlantic on 19 Feb 2016. The article is about researchers trying to understand the acoustics of ancient churches, and the person being quoted is one of the researchers who studied how the physical design of churches affected their acoustics. Another superbly evocative metaphor: jugs, which themselves are vessels of liquid, sipping frequencies out of the air. Wow. (P/S. People actually talk like that! PP/S. Although LaFrance could have interviewed Donahue over email. PPP/S. Still!)
Bear's Den 