Pascal Bruckner on the Western cult of happiness:
This belief in our ability to will ourselves happy also lies behind the contemporary obsession with health. What is health, correctly understood, but a kind of permission we receive to live in peace with our bodies and to let ourselves be carefree? These days, though, we are required to resist our mortality as far as possible. The domain of therapy tends to annex everything that once belonged to the art of living well. Food, for example, is divided not into good and bad but into healthy and unhealthy. The appropriate prevails over the tasty, the carefully measured over the irregular. The dinner table becomes a kind of pharmacy counter where fat and calories are weighed, where one conscientiously chews foods that are hardly more than medications. Wine must be drunk not for its taste, under this regimen, but to strengthen the arteries; whole-grain bread must be eaten to aid digestion; garlic must be bitten off raw for various health reasons.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
The Importance of Knowing
- Your goals
- Your resources
- Your weaknesses
- Your strengths
- Your friends
- Your allies
- Your enemies
- Your surroundings
- Your deadlines
- Your habits
- Your values
- Your prejudices
- Your image
- Your debts
- Your health
- Your priorities
- Your direction
- Your mistakes
- Your achievements
- Your pace
- Your God
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Visiting Mad Dog
Writing in The Weekly Standard, Matt Labash recalls a visit down the rabbit hole:
I tasted the fruits of Tripoli, though not the fermented ones. Libya, like so much of the joyless Maghreb and Middle East, is a country that survives on near beer. I strolled along empty plastic bottles, also known as the beach. The only other beachgoer I spotted was a fellow who was openly relieving himself in the Mediterranean, and from the look of the mounds of trash on the shoreline, this likely improved the water quality. I sampled the charms, such as they are, of the Old City. At least I think it was the Old City. It’s hard to tell sometimes in Libya, where everything, from the Soviet-bloc-style tenement architecture to the used toilet someone tried to sell me at the souk, has lived beyond its expiration date.
I tasted the fruits of Tripoli, though not the fermented ones. Libya, like so much of the joyless Maghreb and Middle East, is a country that survives on near beer. I strolled along empty plastic bottles, also known as the beach. The only other beachgoer I spotted was a fellow who was openly relieving himself in the Mediterranean, and from the look of the mounds of trash on the shoreline, this likely improved the water quality. I sampled the charms, such as they are, of the Old City. At least I think it was the Old City. It’s hard to tell sometimes in Libya, where everything, from the Soviet-bloc-style tenement architecture to the used toilet someone tried to sell me at the souk, has lived beyond its expiration date.
Creativity Exercise: The Departure Gate
Years ago, when I flew to Honolulu on a business trip, the departure gate was decorated with exotic flowers. Island music was playing softly. The flight attendants wore Hawaiian shirts. Everything was designed to get you in the proper mood for your destination.
All of which makes me wonder, how would an equivalent experience be prepared at the departure gates for the following cities?
- Newark, New Jersey
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Detroit, Michigan
- Las Vegas, Nevada
- Los Angeles, California
And let's not leave Paris, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, and London out of the mix.
White Nile Kayaker
THE LONE AFRICAN EXPLORER drags his kayak ashore and begins to collect firewood from around the little beach on the left bank of the White Nile. It's April 10, 2007, and the day's descent of some of the continent's most powerful rapids has worn him to exhaustion. But he can't sleep. Not without fire. He's also careful not to stray beyond the jungle's green curtain—this is Uganda's Murchison Falls National Park, after all, home to the world's densest populations of hippopotamus and Nile crocodile, one an extremely territorial 4,500-pound vegetarian with six-inch dagger tusks and the other a voracious 12-foot-long opportunist.
Read the rest of the Outside article here.
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