A good friend and yoga teacher alerted me to this wonderful book before leading me through a powerful pranayama practice involving The Pause, essentially allowing a natural break at the end of the exhale and the inhale, without strain, without effort.*
It was one of the most calming and elevating experiences that my ordinarily chaotic mind, so resistant to rest, has had the joy to experience. Moments of clear wonder.
It was DH Lawrence who said that “the only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself”. His point being that the collective story of humanity, whether in fact or fiction, as chronicled in the billions of words scratched onto paper and battered into computers by individuals across the world and throughout the ages, are testament to the enduring struggle that we all face to make sense of our place in the world.
The deceitfully simple idea that “to know thyself” is the reason for living, the ceaseless echo through the centuries of Socrates’ call that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, is the most maddening challenge there is.
As the philosopher Alan Watts once said: “Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.”
Why so? Because this interminable process of becoming who we are, of knowing what we should even aim to become, is exhausting. Writer or reader, the challenge is the same. We think therefore we suffer. That’s the unavoidable truth. The point is how you respond, which is where autobiographical accounts or indeed any story, fact or fiction, come in.
Read the rest of the article in the London Literary Review here.
Reading is a serious business. It takes precious, irrecoverable, finite time to devote yourself to a book. In doing so, you make an active decision to press pause on your ordinary life so as to step into another world, another place, another time.
Day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour. Measures of worth and progress plotted on the artificial construct of human time known as the clock, where every moment that passes in which you don’t succumb to the compulsion to self-sabotage your wise intentions is a small, significant victory for sanity
Is madness the price we pay for consciousness? And how much has our comprehension moved on since the 19th century, when psychiatry was in its infancy and “lunatics” were locked away in prison-like asylums?
Those are the questions posed by Sebastian Faulks’ novel Human Traces, which charts how two men seek to unravel “the metaphysical enigma” of the mind over a 50-year period between the 1870s and the 1920s.
As International Women’s Day reminds us of the battles still being fought in the seemingly interminable quest for parity in all aspects of social, cultural, political and economic life, the likes of Smith, Didion, Lorna Sage, Siri Hustvedt, Susan Sontag (the list goes on) are testament to the strength and inestimable value of the female voice.
“The magic of escapist fiction is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and, in the process of escaping, it can furnish you with armour, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better. It’s a real escape — and when you come back, you come back better armed than when you left.” - Neil Gaiman.
In his final novel, Island, Aldous Huxley created a vision of utopia where the Pacific island of Pala is an “oasis of happiness and freedom,” free from the trappings of capitalism, consumerism, and technology. Some say that the Island is an example of humanity at its sanest and most admirable. Yet it ends, predictably, in sorrow, “the work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night.” So, what was Huxley’s point in creating then destroying a vision of paradise?
Here we are in 2015, approaching 90 years since women got the vote, being urged to celebrate all that we’ve achieved in honour of International Women’s Day. And there’s a lot to celebrate – we are not only more visible, we are also playing more of a leading role in society, politics, the economy and the arts. However, there’s no denying that the struggle isn’t over, we’ve a long way to go yet.
The question of what motivates and inspires writers has enduring appeal for anyone eager to pursue the creative life. It also reveals some fascinating insights from which anyone can benefit. We all have a story to tell, as individuals, organisations, communities, societies, businesses. And just like any story, if it’s interesting enough and told well, people will listen.
How many of us really think about the different components of our being — our identity as determined by our own actions and beliefs, and who we are as perceived by others? For most of us, it isn't until we face a struggle in life — for the right to justice, equality, political representation, even the basic struggle as experienced by all of us at one time or another to belong — that our identity starts to matter in dramatic ways.
For anyone who’s ever harboured a perverse, semi-intellectual fetish for stationery, there is no substitute for the crisp, clean greeting that is the opening page of a new notebook. It’s easy to romanticise the humble pen and paper in an age when digital communication is taking over the world. There’s no arguing with how computers have propelled productivity - the internet is flooded with an infinite tirade of verbiage. But is this necessarily a good thing?
Based on the advice of writers from Stephen King to David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Zadie Smith and many more, when I cannot write my designated daily quota of 500 words on one subject, I turn to reading. I scour the net, my bookshelves and every local bookshop, in search of inspiration, thirsty for facts that might ultimately furnish each of my projects with added authenticity.