Some things I have loved recently:
'Another Earth' another great sort-of SF indie film from USA from a few years ago.
John Gray's 'The Soul of the Marionette'. Excellent, read it in a day as I could not put it down. Now I want to research Giacomo Leopardi, who he quotes at length. I wish I could do so here, especially page 35, and perhaps I will when my hands stop aching (a mixture of low-atmospheric-pressure-induced arthritis and the after-effects of attempting bow-drill fire lighting: the T'ai Chi adage 'this truly is not easy' pretty much sums it up.) At the end of the book on page 161 Gray tantalisingly refers to what he calls 'the practice of mutual no-interference - a rare skill that is slowly learnt and quickly forgotten.'
Yes!
He goes on to say:
'The purpose of this 'negative' freedom is not to promote the evolution of humans into rational beings, or enable them to govern themselves; it is to protect human beings from each other.'
Excellent.
Our dear classmate Marcel Theroux is thanked in the book for conversations that fed into its writing, and I know he recently went to see Gray. As to whether Gray is secretly a Taoist...
Intriguing paths led off the straight Roman Road cutting across the chalk.
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