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The Immaterialist

resilient living in a limitless world

Tag: bookreview

February 8, 2023February 8, 2023

Here are (five of) the books that made my heart sing in 2022

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This weekend was busy but beautiful 🙏

Danish philosopher and artist Willy Ørskov describes objects as congealed or fixated occurrences. By this he indicates that an object is charged with the time that was put into it, and to an extent also with the time-period or the zeitgeist in which it was created. The creation time and the way that the creator—or designer—has interacted with the material leaves traces in or on the object, and those traces form a narrative of the time and the hands behind the object, which adds to the value of the object.

Langtidsholdbare, bæredygtige designprodukter bliver stadig mere populære blandt forbrugere og virksomheder. Der er en stigende bevidsthed om de negative miljømæssige og sociale konsekvenser af overforbrug og hurtige trends, og flere og flere søger derfor bæredygtige alternativer.

“King Salomon once lost a chess game to his most trusted advisor, Benaiah Ben Yehoyada. Being a bit of a bad loser, King Salomon decides to teach Benaiah a humbling lesson by assigning him an impossible task: to find him a ring with the power to make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. Benaiah is given half a year to produce this magical ring. He searches in every corner of the kingdom, but to no avail.

This weekend was all about our new house, which we are supposed to move into in two weeks! Doesn’t look like it right now though 😅 (there is a photo of it here, and while it might look nearly finished it is far from!). Damn, building a house here is stressful!

"Nothing is more life-denying than fighting against the law of life: everything is on the way, and not in its final form", Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

Ever since I studied Philosophy at University in my early 20s I have been fascinated by the sublime aesthetic experience. The first time I heard about the sublime, it spoke to my heart.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Continuation from previous post:

Many places in the world - and also here in Bali - crafts-traditions are dying out due to their inability to compete with fast, short-lived machine-made products. This might seem strange, as the general cravings and longings are leaning toward slowness and analogue experiences. But despite the immediate mismatch between a return to slowness and endangered crafts, the explanation might not be farfetched. The discrepancy is typically caused by a lack of understanding of and insight into the skill and time that go into creating handcrafted products, as well as a loss of touch with the importance and immense benefit of being exposed to tactile stimuli.

Continuation from yesterday’s post:

When we think of our milieu, we tend to look at it in terms of solely our human-made environment - with all the infrastructure, constructions, and social and cultural conducts this entails. Within this environment there is a lot to learn for children and teenagers; there are a multitude of ways in which they must be cultivated in order to fit in and become decent citizens, neighbours, consumers, employees or employers, colleagues, friends, and spouses. Furthermore, the cityscapes we have created require lots of skills for young humans to navigate: they must learn how to steer traffic, first on foot, later perhaps on bicycle (depending where they grow up), and even later on or in motor vehicles, as well as in public transportation (if that is the dominant source of transport where they live).

Finally! A new interview at The Immaterialist blog with an incredible human being: @daisyandthyme from @seedsandstoriesuganda

Everything is always in flux, always on its way. Such is the law of life. Our surroundings, natural and man-made as well as our emotional and physical states are always changing, always in process. And yet, we tend to plea for constancy, for stagnation, for perfection, because the continuous movement of all things, including time, frightens us and reminds us of our limited time here in this life. And so, we tend to shelter ourselves in homes that never change, to hold on to traditions and rituals that should ideally be renewed, to do the same things over and over again as a persistent attempt to deny the fact that nothing ever stays the same.

My dad sent me a text message and a photo yesterday. He was up early again (he has always had trouble sleeping. I guess I inherited that from him), and was having breakfast as the day dawned. The living room was still dark, and he had lit a candle, made coffee and been to the bakery down the street for freshly baked bread (lucky for him they open at 6 o'clock). He was thinking about me, he wrote, and missing me. It made me happy. And a little sad as well. Living really far from family can be hard; I would have loved to bicycle over to share some coffee and bread with him. And then I realised something: isn’t it grandad's birthday today? I wrote back. Yes, he responded. And then: I am sitting here thinking of him now.

I wrote an article about five books that made my heart sing in 2022 ❤️

Ok, so I have also been playing around with AI - more specifically @openaidalle Pretty fun!

I have written a new, rather long article at The Immaterialist blog (hope you are up for a long read! Link in bio 🙏). Part of it is taken from my book Anti-trend.

From the most intense beauty; colours so crisp you can almost taste them, sweet tropical fruits, deep blue skies, waterfalls, and serene, picturesque views, to intense, stinky traffic, dog fights, dudes selling rabbits from small cages, and barking short-legged monsters. Bali you have it all.!

Two nights ago lightening struck our house. Not metaphorically speaking. No, lightening actually hit us! I have never experienced anything like it before (and probably never will again). The sound, the flash of light, and after that, the darkness (as it wiped ou all our electrical installations). Intense! Sublime! Scary! Beautiful! We were lucky, I guess, as nothing happened besides from lightpulps popping and routers being fried. But also lucky to experience this immense force of nature. So bright! So loud! And, the craziest thing of it all is that lightening struck exactly above my desk, where I sit for hours every day and write!

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