Stuart Woods Books

A few quotes on how a beach can teach us so much about life and living. About how on some days, life may be bright and sunny, while on the others dark, stormy and scary. All you have to do is to be there and face it, no matter what happens.

“The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.”- Isak Dinesen

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don’t let yourself indulge in vain wishes.”- Rabindranath Tagore

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”- Anna Quindlen

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”- Isaac newton

“My life is like a stroll on the beach…as near to the edge as I can go.”- Thoreau

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”- Victor Hugo

“Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.”- Robert Henri

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”- Mother Teresa

“Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.”- William Stafford

“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.”- Albert Schweitzer

“Eternity begins and ends with the ocean’s tides.”- Unknown Read the rest of this entry »

Michelangelo painted ‘The Last Judgment’. The massive painting covers the entire wall behind the alter of the Sistine chapel. It is a painting of Jesus judging the people on earth and sending them to either Heaven or Hell by the saints.

This was a painting that caused much dispute. Michelangelo was accused of intolerable obscenity as well as immorality because most of the figures are naked. Due to the excessiveness of genitalia and the amount human anatomy detail, twenty four years later priest paid another painter to clothed figures such as the Virgin Mary.

The Last Judgment also steered away from traditional depictions of the painting. Michelangelo depicts Christ very muscular and beardless. He is surrounded by light and the picture seems to focus around him instead of a classical heaven and hell. Linear perspective is also noticeable in this painting replacing the traditional horizontal layers. It is said that Michelangelo uses the science of cosmology with the depiction of Christ because he resembles the Greek Sun God, Apollo and is in the center symbolizing the center of the universe.

At the same time music began to become an essential part of daily life during the High Renaissance. The new ideas that were spreading across Europe reformed the way political, economic, and religious views were valued. This led to major changes in the style of composing methods used in music.New musical genres and instruments developed splitting the patronage into groups. The Catholic Church and Protestant churches were sources for music printing not to mention a source of income for composers of this era.

Composers during the middle Ages and Early Renaissance worked with cantus-firmus but it was not really until the Protestant Reformation that important changes began to occur starting with the church. Hymns began to be sung by a group rather than an individual. This brought a monographic vocal into a harmony. This was also a time when psalms of the Bible started to be translated into French and set to music. Read the rest of this entry »

By the utilitarian perspective, the author means action and knowledge, the practical life, the world of perceptions – signs we may ignore because they are only a means towards knowledge and action. The utilitarian perspective does not actually pay too much attention to the world in general. On the contrary, it envisions the world from a rather deforming perspective. Delacroix states that we must animate the world in order to get in touch with it. And without art, man would be deprived of an entire world. Art is a sort of pause in the blind march which can cancel our interior or exterior perception in favor of what that march stands for or represents.

Art can be seen as the world in its concrete realization, integrated within the spirit in its whole capacity to act and to perceive. And the utilitarian perspective only represents a deviation of this, based on the biological or social utility. Art can bring man back to the path from which the social or biological utility had taken him away. Art can awaken a very powerful kind of virtual world, which life itself had canceled. Our consciousness is apparently organized by organizing in itself creatures and things, starting from an undifferentiated chaos in which the virtual variants of the ego and the non-ego get mixed up. Delacroix also says that we are not closed inside our very own practical ego. Sympathy is possible because we hold on to things because we hold on to ourselves. That is because we are what we are not, just because we are. Furthermore, our creating capacities and energies exceed the useful appearances to which they may seem to be reduced.

The thing art does is to re-shape and re-construct the spiritual energy or substance it has already sent to the outside world. Art needs a spiritual world, in fact in needs the whole world to be as a common spirit. The world of art is a creation of the spirit and in it the harmony of the spiritual life can manifest.

According to Delacroix, aesthetics of life can be unsatisfying. Everybody agrees to the fact that art is a manifestation of energies. Also, we all may share the idea that beauty can stimulate and entertain life, that there is in art a certain degree of spending and also something related to the idea of hierarchy of things according to the aesthetic principles. In certain ages, this doctrine of exuberance and spontaneity happily opposes the schematics and dryness which characterized conventions and academic spirit.

However, the doctrines of life often got lost in confusion and vagueness, and in order to signify something, they need to be defined. Thus, the feeling of life always had to be defined in order for it to gain an aesthetic value. Art is a way of thinking which can be realized and accomplished and not merely an expanding fecundity, not just an impulse, a lawless invention. We can animate things by our very own life and at the same time, we animate ourselves when coming into contact with things, we submit ourselves to their power of suggestion. It is a game of ego and non-ego, of constraints and freedom.

Reality never offers us an already shaped and constructed aesthetic fact which we would only have to extract from it. Delacroix stresses the idea that art is fabrication and artifice. Thus, it is quite distinct from what we call the real world. It is a construction of obedient and expressive forms.

Over time, several factors came into play to compile a rulebook of sorts to describe what it took for a work of words to be classified as ‘minimal’. The most prominent among them are:
•The need of extensive interpretation by a reader of the work; you will often find places where the author intentionally leaves figurative blank spaces that you, the reader, will need to elaborate on yourself.
•An absence of adjectives in general; this relates to the above point, as the author will tend to leave some loose ends that the author expects the readers to understand (or interpret) themselves.
•The absence of a narrator; this will again weigh the readers sense of imagination.
•Paraphrasing to include human actions and a figurative language; minimalist authors will time and again prove (amusingly enough, with words) that actions speak louder than words. Rather than describing what goes on in a character’s mind before or during a scene, the author will directly take you there and show what the character is doing.
To put it blandly, minimalism in literature can be defined by some as putting words on auto-pilot, still allowing the passengers to admire the view that they themselves end up creating. Any details (or filling up of details) left by the writer is the responsibility of the reader. All this is done without the author withholding complete release of the tale to the readers, steering it towards the climax, thus giving it the readability and attraction needed.