Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
[Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.
If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.
‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.
‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’
Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’
Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.
One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.
We can easily imagine from our own experience why fire might be used as a symbol of the life of a house and the family that lives there. The fire was certainly the most lifelike element of the house: it consumed food and left behind waste; it could grow and move seemingly by its own will; and it could exhaust itself and die. And most important it was warm, one of the most fundamental qualities that we associate with our own lives. When the fire dies, its remains become cold, just as the body becomes cold when a person dies. Drawing a parallel to the concept of the soul that animates the physical body of the person, the fire, then, is the animating spirit for the body of the house.
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.
Problem
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
If I don't ask, I won't get.
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.
This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world.
Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.
Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.
Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?
In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.
And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.
If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.
Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.
When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.
The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.
Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.
I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.
Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”
I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my heroes, but I still have a long way to go.
This is a list of people I'd like to high five IRL.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.
Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous "one liners," or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a "Jenny Holzer's Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought." She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.
When we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.
Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:
- Love > Attachment
- Compassion > Sentimentality
- Joy > Elation
- Equanimity > Apathy
I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
The wind is rising!
...We must try to live.— Paul Valéry
Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.
People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”
World renowned architect Kengo Kuma presents an enlightening tour of Tokyo, expressing his personal thoughts and reflections on the city's most influential buildings and its rich architectural heritage.
I became a 'border person', as defined by the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber, viewing Tokyo from an outsider's perspective. Observing the city while walking around its streets enabled me to discover a wide variety of location, cultures and people, and that Tokyo is a collection of small villages, rather than one big city.
...When I design a building in any city, I believe that the world is a collection of villages, instead of a group of nations.
While [Kenzo] Tange aspired to verticality, we looked to horizontality, believing that pre-1964 Tokyo, with its low wooden silhouettes, was a better model for the city of the future.
Roland Barthes wrote that the centre of Tokyo is occupied by a void...it is a quiet forest that lies at Tokyo's heart.
...The centre of Tokyo is certainly a void, but one that is protected by a circular train line, the Yamanote, which forms a 40-km (25-mile) loop around it. It seems to me that this ring of steel emphasizes the importance of the void, and the depth of its significance.
In cities across the world, industrial zones beside rivers and canals have become the focus of attention, with their unique vivacity associated with places where things are made.
...Because the area is designated as a semi-industrial zone, we were able to get away with such an enormous machine inside [the Starbucks Reserve Roastery].
In the centre of the forest is the sandō, leading up to the shrine. It follows an L-shaped curve, and is very different to the straight processional pathways found in religious buildings in the West or in China. Curves ensure that the view changes constantly, helping visitors make the transition to a deeper, more spiritual place.
In the design of Japanese tea houses, the building is seen as less important than the path (roji) leading up to it, and tea masters of the past believed that the journey along the roji allowed participants to better immerse themselves in the slow time of the tea ceremony.
Le Corbusier, the greatest architect of the last century, noted that 'architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in light', demonstrating to what extent light has been prioritized in the Western tradition. Tanizaki, on the other hand, spoke of the important of shadows, of extended eaves. Rather than the light that shines directly into a room, he praised the soft light that penetrates a space after being reflected off the floor, and again from the ceiling.
...In Japanese architecture, the gentle light that passes through shoji screens serves a key purpose. It reaches right to the back of the room, so that the space feels bright, even without the aid of artificial light. The soft light filtering through the white film at Takanawa Gateway Station represents a form of light that was forgotten about by Japanese Modernism.
To give the building a sense of the delicacy associated with such crafts, as well as a feeling of warmth, I designed louvres from white porcelain panels, and used them to cover the outer walls. The louvres are tapered, to make their tips as fine as possible. (In fact, making tips as thin as possible is one of my key design principles: the thin lip of a teacup allows a better experience of the subtleties of tea - this is always at the forefront of my mind when I pay such close attention to edges.)
During the twentieth century, much importance was attached to things that were big and tall, but, as we moved into the twenty-first century, I felt that being big and tall had become embarrassing.
...Today, skyscrapers are frowned upon in Japan, and are seen as the product of the mistaken mindset that prevailed during the country is period of enhanced growth.
Tange put Tsukiji as the centre of his plan, which now seems grandiose and delusional. His design for the Dentsu building had much in common with the Metabolist philosophy of the 1960s, which maintained that buildings needed to continually evolve in a flexible way.
...With [the Nakagin Capture Tower], Kurokawa's Metabolist philosophy was fully realized. After it was completed, however, it became almost impossible to switch over the capsules - indeed, since its completion, not one of the capsules has been moved. As a result, the Metabolist movement has been forgotten. Yet its core principles, which sought to draw architectural lessons from living organisms, has much inspiration to offer society today.
Many of the stations [on the Yamanote Line] have one entrance on the uphill side and another lower down, and the neighbourhoods around them have a totally different feel, depending on which exit you use to leave the station.
The hilly areas in Tokyo are mostly made up of quiet, well-to-do residential districts, while the lower sections often have more of a populist feel, with shopping arcades and small urban factories. As a result, the atmosphere outside the entrances are dramatically different in character. Take the wrong exit, and you might find yourself lost in a completely different kind of neighbourhood than you were expecting. In Tokyo, elite and working-class cultures exist alongside one another and mix together. I think the fundamental cause of this is the complexity of the city's topography.
...Tokyo is a city of hills, with most of it lying on an alluvial plain between the Tama and Kanda rivers. It is via these hills that the upland, elite neighbourhoods are connected with the more working-class areas down below. The slopes are thus a key part of the co-existence of these two worlds, used by people to come and go between them. Kagurazaka is particularly notable in this respect.
All of the wooden shelves used for storing books were on the warehouse's first floor. We decided to keep these shelves as they were to form a library, and we also created a small lecture hall for holding talks by writers and makers. Although contemporary society is moving away from books and towards computers and information technology, people nevertheless have a strong feeling of connection to – and nostalgia for – trees and things that are made from wood. La kagu is a space where visitors can really get a sense of the culture of books. When they step inside, some even say that they can smell wood.
Historically, Japan's shrines have been built in order to worship the gods who live in the sacred mountains or seas; They don't reside in the shrine itself, but in the space beyond it. This belief that the spirits and deities exist beyond the confines of the shrine, and that the shrine itself acts not as a centre, but as a kind of gateway, is very different to the grand, imposing churches and cathedrals of Christianity.
The majority of shrines are not found in the mountains or in the middle of the fields, therefore, but at the borders of mountain villages – which is to say, at what is seen as the edge of the mountains. The tori gate, marking the entrance to a shrine, indicates that there are gods on the other side of it.
On the opposite bank of the Sumida River lies the Asahi Beer headquarters (1989), a strange building with a golden sculpture mounted on top of a granite-plated black box. It was designed by Philippe Starck, and completed in 198g when the Japanese economy was still going strong. The sculpture, with no clearly defined use, is a clear representation of its time. Today, the building is known as the 'golden poo', a reference to the shape of its crowning object.
The Sumida is a symbol of Tokyo, but is not like the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris, or other rivers that are woven into the geography of the city. Its banks were pushed back, so that the river became extremely wide and travelling across it feels liberating, like crossing the sea.
I decided to furnish the restaurant [Tetchan] with the kinds of discarded items one wouldn't normally use in interior design, from recycled LAN cables to acrylic by-products.
When using discarded objects in interior design, it gives even brand-new places the feeling that they have always been there. I think this is due to the inherent history of these thrown-away items, which lives on inside of them.