**From & To Satish **( New Pictures Pl see pg 163) - Page 153

A Dream Within A Dream

The River of Life

by Thomas Campbell

 
The more we live, more brief appear
     Our life's succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems a year,
     And years like passing ages.
 
The gladsome current of our youth,
     Ere passion yet disorders,
Steals lingering like a river smooth
     Along its grassy borders.
 
But as the careworn cheek grows wan,
     And sorrow's shafts fly thicker,
Ye Stars, that measure life to man,
     Why seem your courses quicker?
 
When joys have lost their bloom and breath
     And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death,
     Feel we its tide more rapid?
 
It may be strange—yet who would change
     Time's course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone
     And left our bosoms bleeding?
 
Heaven gives our years of fading strength
     Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
     Proportion'd to their sweetness.
 

Why post so many dwelling poems, so early in the morning?

My second friend came and brought me information about different treatments being used for cancer. He said,
"What ever you do, don't take chemotherapy.
It's a poison!"
He left and I felt scared and confused.

My fourth friend came and told me,
"If your faith is just great enough God will heal you."
He left and I felt my faith must be inadequate.

My fifth friend came an told me to remember that
"All things work together for good."
He left and I felt angry.

My seventh friend came and held my hand and said,
"I care, I'm here, I want to help you through this."
He left and I felt loved!

Edited by spain - 11 years ago

Hi ,

                      I dwell for in this land i dwell among the dwelling.Those poems awake in my breast a sleeping spirit that says arise and breathe.arise and unclench those fingers that are clasped in fear of the past ghosts.I arise and yet fall for i see kindred spirits still clenched and huddled in fear.And so i reach for those classics on poems and quotes written by classics among men and rejuvenate my spirit.I lay my mortal coils and pine myself with those words of misery and beauty and yet those eyes of mine are wide open and plastered against the window pane hoping just hoping that those and which went away in the wind will yet fly my way again and so i can cast myself in their bosoms and tell my tale of lost lives and lost moments.

                                   And here in these words lie very east to decipher and there above in my post remain poems very easy to understand on where my heart flows and where i lie among the darkened ruins fingers still clenched and in my bosom beats a heart,feeble yet straining against my skin.Be well.

Cheer up! Life has its funny moments too...

                                Out of Touch  by Andrew Piper


Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn't only a matter of our brains; it's something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future.

Understanding reading at this most elementary level—at the level of person, habit, and gesture—will be essential as we continue to make choices about the kind of reading we care about and the kind of technologies that will best embody those values. To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read




The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine. In the eighth book of his Confessions, Augustine describes the moment of his conversion to becoming a Christian:


In my misery I kept crying, "How long shall I go on saying, 'tomorrow, tomorrow?' " Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this very moment? I was asking myself these questions when all at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, "Take it and read, take it read."


Augustine is sitting beneath a fig tree in his garden, and upon hearing the voice he takes up the Bible lying near him and opens a passage at random and begins reading (Romans 13:13-14). At this moment, he tells us, "I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled." Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one. Not just reading but reading books was aligned in Augustine with the act of personal conversion. Augustine was writing at the end of the fourth century, when the codex had largely superseded the scroll as the most prevalent form of reading material. We know Augustine was reading a book from the way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to mark his place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was an affirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives of individuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readers into individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of the scroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turn in one's own life.



Books, like hands, hold our attention. As early as the 12th century, writers began drawing hands in the margins of their books to point to important passages. Such a device gradually passed into typescript and became a commonplace of printed books. It looked like this: ?. The pointing hand in the book stood for the way books themselves were like pointers, making the world graspable. If books open us out into the world, they also constrain. They bring the world down to size, inoculations against the problem of patternlessness.

The child's first drawing is often of his or her own hand. The footprint may be the first mark we make in the world (for hospital records), but the handprint is the original sign of self-reflection, of understanding ourselves as being in the world. The "handbook" or "manual"—the book that reduces the world into its essential parts, into outline form—is an extension of this art of measurement. It is one of the oldest types of books, dating back to Epictetus's Enchiridion (second century), a short repository of nuggets of wisdom. In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede taught readers to count to a million on their hands in his On the Reckoning of Time (725). By the 15th and 16th centuries, the measuring hand would become the ultimate sign of our bibliographic relationship to the world, embodied in the new genre of the atlas. In its first incarnation, Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the entire world could now be held in the reader's hand. The secular bravura on display in these books, where the reader assumed the divine view, cannot be overstated. By the 17th century, the great age of wars of religion, palmistry, and chiromancy, knowledge of and on the hand would become major sciences. Handbooks seem to proliferate in periods of intellectual and technological uncertainty, much as they are proliferating today.

In the 19th century, readers witnessed the birth of reading as touch, in the form of Louis Braille's invention of a dot-matrix reading system for the blind in 1824. The method derived from an earlier request by Napoleon for a code that could be read by his soldiers at night in the field without the use of light. Braille's innovation was to make the dot-matrix representation of letters small enough to correspond to a single touch of the finger. It made reading digital in a very literal sense. By the end of the century, libraries such as the National Library for the Blind in Britain contained over 8,000 volumes in braille, one of many subsequent technologies that aimed to bring reading to the visually impaired.

The turn of the 20th century was a period of numerous experiments with the tactility of reading, both practical and impractical, culminating in the modernist revival of experimental books between the world wars. Books made of sandpaper, cardboard, cheap notebook paper, wood, and even metal were some of the many ways that artists experimented with the touch of reading. In the Russian artist El Lissitzky's celebrated Architecture of VKhUTEMAS (1927), we see how the disembodied hand of the divine voice from the medieval book has returned, now in the form of the drafting hand of modern science. With the compass needle seemingly woven into the hand's grip, we can see Lissitzky performing a subtle visual pun. The compass needle is imagined to stand in for the sewing needle, one of the original tools of bookmaking through the sewn binding of the book's spine. For the Russian avant-garde, the rectilinearity of modernism—the cube, plane, column, grid—was as much born from the book as it was the industrial Gargantua of the new machine age. The handbook was one of modernism's secret muses.

***



New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?

Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus. Faust, which means fist in German, was one of the most important folk heroes of the early modern world, which saw the invention of printing. Faust was a product of all those books that were increasingly available to readers. Unlike Don Quixote, a rough contemporary who steadily devoured works of fiction, Faust tried to know too much about the world. Faust was Quixote's serious side. He tried to surpass what could be known in a book, whether it was the Bible or the alchemical handbook, famously fleeing his book-lined study at the opening of the tragedy. Faust, the fist, in other words, is our modern day demon, not Mephistopheles, his devilish double. Faust reminds us of the way books are totems against ceaseless activity, tools for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning of all careful but also visionary thought. If we believe in the value of rest, and the kind of conversional thinking that it makes possible, then we will want to preserve books and their spaces of readerly rest.

But Faust also reminds us not to hold on too tightly. He shows us the risks of grasping. He reminds me that the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand.

The Art of Friendship by Jessica Vivian Chiu

Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to "friendship" in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition.


Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give?


I had hoped the letters might reveal something about friendship: how to be a good friend, when to let go. And they did—but in negative. Virtue, it seems, lives in action; the ways that we make recognition known in matters important and not.


Friendship, Aristotle suggests, is the most immediate form of public personhood; it motivates a person for moral excellence, ennobles us to become a stronger unit for a social whole. And yet, the thing is this: the very material of friendship is the exchange of it. In friendship, sentiment is the relationship. Friendship may have a public aspect, but it is essentially a private exchange.


The reassuring thing is that no single law rules over us. Friendship is a return, as variable as we are

I Really Like That You Like What I Like
How did the Internet get so cozy?

    By Nathan Heller
    


The Internet, like your dentist's assistant, is never kinder than when disaster strikes. On normal days, the kind on which you glide across an afternoon on too much coffee and a midweek buzz of anomie, you might not notice the deep and pervasive treacle of online life. But when a tsunami hits Japan, an earthquake crushes Haiti, or an embassy attack leaves foreign servicemen dead, even the most calloused tweeter goes soft inside, and every laptop turns into a small news service all its own. Sorrow pours down from the loftiest peaks. Help shines through each browser window. At such moments, the web becomes a nurturing and shining place, and every stiff-jawed critic seems to want to send you forward with hugs and a smile.



For those of us who learned to love the web best as a hostile, predatory, somewhat haunted place, this kindness is startling—but not as startling as it might once have been. These days, life online has become friendly, well mannered, oversweet. Everyone is on his or her very best behavior—and if they're not, they tend to be quickly iced out of the conversation. The sweet camaraderie that flourished during Sandy isn't just for terror and crisis anymore; it has become the way the Internet lives now.



Our relationship to news and public figures isn't the only thing that's changed. We are endlessly flattering one another, too—sharing everything we do with everyone we know, and reflexively praising every biographical detail that comes over the transom to us. There is always sunshine to be found on the web, and usually we find it—trading compliments or loading our Twitter feeds with people whose goals, opinions, and politics mirror ours. Campaigns may be mean and cacophonous, but we tend to construct echo chambers for our own parties' triumphant choruses. What is that noise? It's the sound of one hundred million backs being slapped, and it's getting louder.

Ten years ago, the web offered the worldview of a disaffected apparatchik and the perils of a Wild West saloon. Brawls broke out frequently; snideness triumphed; perverts, predators, and pettifoggers gathered in dark corners to prey on the lost and nave. Now, though, the place projects the upbeat vigor of a Zumba session and the fellow-feeling of a neighborhood caf. On Facebook, strangers coo at photos of your college roommate's South American vacation. Op-eds—widely praised—are generously circulated. And warmth flows even where it probably shouldn't. Today, you find that 27 human beings have "liked" an Instagram photo of your little sister's breakfast muffin. You learn your best and smartest friend in high school—a girl you swapped big dreams with before falling out of touch—just married some guy with enormous bags under his eyes and the wild, deranged grin of Charlie Sheen. You are vaguely concerned, but the web is not. "Congratulations!!!" someone has written underneath the face of Crazy Rictus Man. "luv you guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" enthuses someone else. You count the exclamation points. There are sixteen. You wonder whether there is any Advil close at hand.




On Twitter, where the wonks and witty people are supposed to live, you find yourself lost again on a great plain of goodwill. John Doe, crossing the Twitter threshold, becomes "the brilliant @JohnDoe," doing "wonderful" things. Videos that crop up are "amazing" or "hilarious"—sometimes both—and "excited" feelings prevail, especially when people are doing things that you cannot. ("Excited to be chatting with the brilliant Marshall Goldsmith at Per Se!!") Inspiration triumphs. ("Sitting with Angelina Jolie @ #SaveChildren event! So inspiring, people helping humanity.") Even when it doesn't, though, people give thanks. ("Thank you needed this!!!" "no thank YOU!") If you are in a mood to spread the love, which, probably, you are, it's no problem to pass along your favorite tweets, nicely neutralized. "Retweets aren't endorsements," people say, like a newspaper claiming to run George Will's column just because it happened to be lying around. The more you look, in fact, the harder it seems to find anything on the web that doesn't read like an endorsement. It's enough to make a web curmudgeon desperate for a little aloofness or even a few drops of the old bile. When did the Internet get so nice?

Years back, not long after the dinosaurs stood tall among the ficus plants, web interaction was hailed as the savior of contemporary democratic life. Where once the country had been at the mercy of gatekeepers and corporate connectors, it would now be open for intellectual growth. "Digital highways" would set paths for "free speech," the thinking went, and "free speech" would give power to "ordinary people." The dream did not endure. By 2000, 44 million American households had gone online, but the web had grown into a fairly terrifying place. The New York Post, not traditionally a publication given to propitiation and restraint, ran a piece praising the web's foot soldiers who fought a war online against "stalkers, pedophiles, and po*nography." If we eliminated those contingents, though, would anyone be left?

For most of the ensuing decade, worry remained deliriously high-flown, often with good cause. In 2009, a Boston medical student named Philip Markoff was alleged to have bound and robbed three women (killing one) who had advertised their services on Craigslist—earning him a spot among "Craigslist killers" and making him a poster boy for the Internet's dark side. (He killed himself in jail before trial, writing his ex-fiance's name in blood in his cell.) Other suicides—like 13-year-old Megan Meier, who hanged herself in her bedroom closet in 2006; 15-year-old Phoebe Prince, who killed herself in January 2010; and Amanda Todd, who released a heartrending video of complaints on YouTube before killing herself last month, all said to be the victims of online bullying or abuse—have driven home the grim potential of digital life gone wrong. And those were only the worst of the bunch. The Internet was an unpleasant place even when death didn't loom: Any long-standing web user knows how quickly message-board and comment-section debates could devolve into something like hate speech.

Today, much like the primitive agricultural lexicon underlying modern language, these nightmares shape the way we think about the web down to the reliclike terms of use. To work and play online now, we seek out "secure connections," apply "filters," scan for "spyware," guard against "viruses," and fret over "privacy violations."

Is that old armor still required? When a video circulated this summer showing a partially deaf bus driver, Karen Klein, being verbally abused by her elementary-school charges, it might have proved the Internet's uncaring eye. This time, though, people cared, and in fact they cared so much that on Reddit, the social website known for its sarcastic, unforgiving tone, users tried to set the wrong right. "Lets give Karen a vacation of a lifetime, lets show her the power of the Internets and how kind and generous people can be," a user called Heavyballsareheavy posted on the site, including a link to a fund-raising page. Others joined in and, ultimately, raised more than $700,000 for Klein's retirement: a stunning triumph of coordinated goodwill. Once, the Klein kerfuffle would have seemed a strange anomaly; now it's the high point of an Internet culture in which do-goodism, social activism, and upbeat entrepreneurialism reign.

There's less and less patience with anything else. On the day Sandy hit the East Coast, an account called @comfortablysmug began issuing terrifying Twitter dispatches, making a bad situation sound even worse. "BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than three feet of water"; "BREAKING: Con Edison has begun shutting down ALL power in Manhattan." All the news was false, and, a day later, BuzzFeed writer Jack Stuef outed the account as belonging to Shashank Tripathi, the campaign manager for congressional candidate Christopher R. Wight. (Previously, he was a notorious antagonist in nymag.com's comments sections.) The Internet went mad; Tripathi, who resigned after the outcry, was called "a narcissistic sociopath," "Sandy's worst Twitter villain," and, in one case, "Sir Frankendouche." He's not the only troll to be shamed over the past few weeks. After Obama's victory, Jezebel began flagging Twitter users' racist tweets to call out their purveyors. BuzzFeed did the same under the heading "31 Worst People on the Planet." Years ago, in certain circles, that title might have been an online badge of honor, but now it's unequivocally a scarlet letter. The web has not just started championing the good; it has begun policing it.


 

Online, these days, you can watch a ballet, go to college, learn to make clafoutis, read 50-year-old magazines, purchase scuba gear, plan a trip to Austria, change your investment portfolio, check your blood work, order lunch, read the newspaper, and listen to last month's radio. But post on Facebook or Twitter a snide joke you would have made to your friends after that ballet performance twenty years ago, and you're apt to fall afoul of convention. Just try surprising your Facebook friends with a political wall post.

Sometimes, it can be hard to tell which is shriller: the hate of yesteryear or this new crazy love. "Facebook may have replaced Disneyland as the happiest place on Earth," says Joseph B. Walther, a Michigan State University professor who's been researching Internet interaction for decades. "Even though one individual may be griping about something, all their friends come to their aid and support." Like many researchers of the web, he's quick to note that, in broad terms, the Internet of today is as mean and inhospitable as it has ever been: Scams thrive, bullies abound, and every form of bigotry imaginable has taken hold. We've learned to steer clear of this murky web but can't help driving right toward the sunny one. Is that a good thing? Even an 8-year-old knows that Disneyland isn't healthy every day.

You'd think a change in manners would follow from a change in mood, but the causes of the web's transformation are largely structural, and they boil down to three key shifts—each of them notably long-term ones. First is the medium's sheer growth. As of the 2010 Census, nearly 85 million American households had web access, many of them now with smartphones, too: This dilutes unpleasantness strictly as a matter of volume. Second, the web has grown into a more commercial venue: What was formerly a free-for-all is now a place where ads and goods are sold and nastiness is a threat to good business. Last is the rise of the social web and the importance of web reputation. Unlike the early Internet, which was powered by anonymity, today's web is a familiar place: Instead of going online to hide from the real world, we venture onto the web to partake of it—and to be seen partaking. Where there used to be a lawless place to escape to, there's now only the cuddly, applauding web—or the fantasy of trying to live a complete life without it.



There's increasing variety within a single online life as well. Most of us now use the Internet for work e-mail, personal e-mail, Gchats, Facebook interaction, Twitter postings, private Skype calls, and so on, often in the course of one day. Occasionally, there's confusion changing registers, but mostly we have no problems triaging our styles of expression. "You can't adopt the behaviors you would have in a loud bar when you go to see the Chicago Symphony," says Zizi Papacharissi, a University of Illinois, Chicago, professor who researches online life. There is a word for this: socialization.


Facebook was among the first sites to realize that these habits offered a large-scale commercial opportunity within the existing framework of online social life. According to a 2010 account by director of engineering Andrew Bosworth, the LIKE button took shape in the summer of 2007 as the "awesome button." ("Like" seemed bland.) But by the time it finally went live, in early 2009, it was nearly ready for online commerce. Soon, users "liked" not just posts but ads and "sponsored stories." These "endorsements" were implicated in class-action suits, in California and New York and later nationally, with the plaintiffs claiming that minors whose names and images were associated with "liked" products were being commercially exploited.

These days, that seems like a quaint thought. Today's webby world is one unconflicted about commercialization and remarkably unsqueamish about blunt salesmanship—a place where authors blithely tweet their favorable reviews, and acerbic ironists and stand-up comics turn unflinchingly to self-promotion. The closest to "underground" that the new web gets may be Kickstarter, whose funding projects have raked in a collective $354 million since 2009 (all without the taint of crass commercialism). If you draw in thousands of dollars on Kickstarter, you're an artist with supporters; if you had tried doing the same by contacting your friends directly, just a few years ago, you'd be a mooch and creep. This is the age of privatized sociality—a moment when social life is actually shaped by one's own market interests.

For years, the arrival of market forces in a community announced a growing-up process, the start of the Real World: Hard choices were required; the possibility of failure loomed; only the best would survive. Yet on the web the opposite is rapidly becoming true. We are all children now, hanging our crayon drawings on the wall and cooing indistinguishably over the collective effort.

Shouldn't we mind being addressed as 6-year-olds, though? Why have we taken this unctuous treatment in stride? The truth is that the sweetening of the online space scarcely stands out these days.

Imagine a world in which good manners and the beau ideal trump all, and you have basically imagined the mood of 21st-century American life. New Yorkers once carried mace; now we sit at home in cardigans and pickle cabbage. Angry young men while away quiet hours playing Angry Birds. The big song of this summer—"Call Me Maybe"—was light, reserved, and deeply polite. ("Here's my number?/?So call me, maybe?") How, exactly, did we get here from "You Shook Me All Night Long"?

One answer is that the tide has actually begun to turn: First, we put more and more of our real lives online, then we began to take our cues in real life from the web. A lot of recent media has followed a similar path. A moviegoer in the fifties might well have been enchanted by the genteel, chaste, well-ordered world of Technicolor cinema, but he was not fooled: You could buy clothes like the people in High Society, but you couldn't expect their lives; you could enjoy Nat "King" Cole's courtly manner and canned jokes on his TV show, but understand that this behavior was theatrical, adopted for the camera. At some point, though, these theatrical affectations, inhibitions, and conventions fell away, and we began losing our sense of remove from the cultural life that we saw onscreen. The great lie of reality TV is not that it's spontaneous but that it's turning the lens on a world that actually exists.



That's been the path for online life, too: What was once its own strange and performative place is becoming, ever more, our window onto the national culture. But given the wild outpouring of praise online, one has to wonder how much of what you see is just a public put-on. "OMG your Cartagena vacation looks AMAZING!!!": Is this an expression of envy, interest, or a desire to have me shut up about it? The distance between earnestness and disingenuousness is vanishingly small, and—more alarming still—seems to matter less and less.

If anything, these days, we risk regarding the web as too much of a cultural mirror or, at least, a mirror pointed in the wrong direction: Good faith has become indistinguishable from good speech, and agreeable words risk outweighing the actions that push them toward fruition. In truth, crucial decisions are never quite as simple as an exclamation-filled post of support. We've just emerged from a bitter election season through which many of us moved forward fueled by like-minded applause, seeing only what we wished to see. Yet what comes next isn't a cuddle; it's a struggle. As Sandy reminds us, progress requires strain, discord, and difficult choices. Even the worthiest environmental initiatives come at a cost. Organics can leave a greater carbon footprint than canned food; local produce can cost jobs somewhere far away. Believing in something means being prepared to disagree about it—to fight over it. But who wants to give a thumbs-up to that?

"It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships."
? Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

"Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.  Sometimes it involves being misunderstood or rejected by one's peers.  Those who are not too dependent upon, or too closely involved with, others, find it easier to ignore convention."

                                                                                              storr