Truly stunning photography set captures Asia like I’ve never seen it: (via Stunning Photography Features Rich Culture and Scenic Nature of Asia)

In The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker argues that much of Western civilization is modeled after the “tragic mode.” You’ll recognize that mode from the Greek and Renaissance tragedies you read in primary school. In the tragic mode, a larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image. He succeeds, in part, by mutilating and murdering and generally dragging a swath of blood behind him. But his success is also his undoing, and at the end of the play, his head is carried off the stage. A eulogy praises his bravery while also issuing a caution against those who would follow in his path.

But Meeker proposes an alternative: the comic mode. As you might suspect, the comic mode takes its cues not from the great tragedies but from comedies. Whereas tragedies follow men who are determined to remake the world to suit them, comic characters remake themselves to fit the world.

Mandy Brown, on adopting a comic approach to life (which I can absolutely get behind).

The Pastry Box Project

austinkleon:

The Happy Writer’s Flowchart

ayjay:

in response to Austin Kleon’s Miserable Artist Flowchart

This is great. Highly recommend Alan’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, btw.

It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all. This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved. Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s You and It’s Me by Michael Sacasas  (via stewartmccoy)

We are led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather older age) sophistries. What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.

It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power.

Simon Critchley, in his introduction to The Book of Dead Philosophers

Q&A with a Doystoyevsky expert

RBTH: Why are the characters in his novels always in extreme mental states and on the verge of suicide? Where does all this gloom come from? Bashar Alrustom

L.S.: Dostoevsky believed that in the borderline states a man is better perceived than in everyday life.

When we mythologize ourselves, we tend to amplify the things that turned out okay and try to turn the failures or lack of success into something we learned from. You can do anything to make your life look really grand. It’s a shame that so many people find it difficult to do the things they’d like to do because they feel cowed by seemingly successful people who appear to never do anything wrong, or always learn from their mistakes. That just rings as a lot of B.S. and self-mythology to me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Merlin Mann (although he is ridiculously funny on Back to Work), but there’s always been something intriguing about his brutal honesty, his refusal to present a rose-colored version of himself.

The Great Discontent