Del blog Serendipia : Rebecca West

FAMILIA AUBREY, DE REBECCA WEST La familia Aubrey apura sus vacaciones en Escocia a la espera de trasladarse de vuelta a Londres. El señor Morpurgo le ha conseguido a papá un empleo en el diario de Lovegrove, al sur de la ciudad, y mamá no puede estar más agradecida. Piers Aubrey es un extraordinario escritor y columnista, un pensador formidable, un filósofo querido, pero también un egoísta despilfarrador, ludópata y especulador, que arrastra a su familia de deuda en deuda y que no duda en vender cualquier objeto de valor que le quede a su esposa para seguir arruinándolos a conciencia. Mamá fue una famosa concertista de piano que dejó las giras internacionales para dedicarse a sus hijos: Cordelia, Mary, Rose y Richard Quin. Todos tienen talento musical excepto Cordelia que, para desgracia de todos, se ha empeñado en ser violinista profesional y salvarlos de la ruina. Narrada desde el punto de vista de Rose, la infancia de estos niños en el Londres de principios del siglo XX es cualquier cosa excepto convencional. «—El mundo es un lugar ridículo —dijo mamá—. Demostramos un gran valor enseñando Historia en las escuelas, es descorazonadora.» Cuando Laura Balagué habló de La familia Aubrey en Niu de mones me di cuenta de que Rebecca West era el seudónimo de Cecily Isabel Fairfield, una de las mujeres de H. G. Wells a la que había admirado entre las páginas de la biografía novelada Un hombre con atributos, de David Lodge. Trotalibros ya nos había comentado en 2018 lo mucho que le había gustado El regreso del soldado de Rebecca West, pero como por entonces todavía no había leído el libro de Lodge no até cabos. Resumiendo, que Rebecca West es el seudónimo de Cecily Fairfield (Londres, 1892-1983), que fue una periodista y escritora, crítica y feminista, que tuvo un hijo con H. G. Wells y que, quizás porque jamás se casó con él, mantuvo su amistad hasta la muerte de Wells, en 1986. West era decidida, independiente y con un carácter tan extraordinario que no flaqueó a la hora de seguir su propio camino -literario y vital- pese a las brutales críticas de la sociedad de su tiempo. La familia Aubrey es una narración casi autobiográfica en la que Rebecca West le presta voz a la niña Rose para deleitar al lector con un universo único del que es imposible no enamorarse. West/Rose tiene esa visión infantil, a la vez impostada por la conciencia de la escritora, del choque de mundos entre los adultos y los niños, pero también la contraposición de una sociedad londinense en la que élite intelectual no se corresponde con élite económica. El contraste entre gente estúpida e ignorante con dinero y la inteligente y cultivada, pero en la ruina, familia Aubrey da pie a situaciones cómicas, extrañas y también desesperantes, como la angustiosa ambición de Cordelia o la rabia de Rose cada vez que le faltan al respeto. Pero es la prosa de Rebecca West, inteligente y precisa, la que obra la magia en esta novela excéntrica, ingeniosa y delicada. La familia Aubrey es el primer volumen de la trilogía que Rebecca West publicó en los años cincuenta del siglo pasado, por lo que comprende solamente la infancia de su alter ego, Rose. La historia transcurre alrededor de la admiración por un padre que no se la merece y el regalo maravilloso que les ofrece Claire, su madre: la música, un lugar donde sentirse a salvo aunque todo lo demás sea miseria y dureza. Quizás por este motivo, a lo largo de toda la novela, el lector no logra comprender la adoración intensa de esposa e hijos por la figura de un padre que, en el mejor de los casos, se puede tildar de canalla egoísta, siendo este el único punto que chirría en una historia excepcional. Sin embargo, la naturaleza humana es así de contradictoria y como esta historia es más real que ficticia… eso resolvería cualquier complejidad narrativa. Lector, te va a encantar conocer a Rose.

En globo

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9NmT1LRcMbgzr8kH8

En globo

En busca de la alegria ( Blog Dr Casado)

En busca de la alegría. In search of joy. 尋找快樂。 Lo que es bello es bueno y quien es bueno, también llegará a ser bello” Safo (650-580 a. C.) La inflación nos quita dinero sin que nos demos cuenta, los políticos derechos, los empleadores dignidad, los comercios calidad. Son cambios habitualmente sutiles que no nos obligan a cambiar de postura. Ocurren con una progresión tan lenta que los convierte en invisibles hasta que pasa el suficiente tiempo y ya suele ser tarde para revertirlos. De este modo muchas sociedades se han visto empobrecidas en los últimos años. Quizá sea verdad que hemos recibido servicios públicos diversos pero también que estos cada vez se pagan más con deuda y se desinvierte en ellos para que sean menos costosos. Por otro lado los empleos van incrementando la carga laboral sin que aumente proporcionalmente la remuneración. El mercado laboral va cambiando eliminando puestos de trabajo y modificando otros. En general hay menos oportunidades y estas son en muchos casos peores que antes. Si ponemos la televisión o nos conectamos a algún medio de información seremos bombardeados instantáneamente por crispación y noticias falsas, el mundo de la política es un epítome de zafiedad que compite con los realities y los tertulianos por un trozo del pastel de la atención. En el universo de las redes sociales pasa lo mismo, el que más grita es el que triunfa. El hecho de dar más importancia a lo desagradable y lo corrupto ha eliminado la estética, la armonía y el arte de las primeras planas de periódicos y telediarios. El coste es brutal para cualquiera, nos han robado la belleza. Y en cuanto al reservorio natural de la misma qué diremos en un mundo donde cada vez paseamos menos, nos desplazamos en vehículos y pasamos menos tiempo al aire libre... Pongamos también una pandemia en la ecuación y obliguemos al personal a taparse la cara con mascarillas, aumentar la distancia unos de otros para que corra el aire y evitemos los bares, teatros y demás. Apaguemos la vida cultural y social, obliguemos a permanecer en el domicilio con toques de queda. La resultante de todos estos cambios es que nos hemos quedado sin alegría desangrados por tantas cuestiones. Cuando el objetivo de la vida no es otro que sobrevivir nos olvidamos de esas pequeñas cosas que hacen que el día valga la pena. Y estamos hablando de la parte rica del planeta, la que si abre el grifo tiene agua y la que cena caliente. No verán ninguna manifestación reclamando alegría, ni a tertuliano o político reivindicándola. Solo los poetas, artistas, locos e infantes la necesitan como el aire, si alguien protesta algo seguramente sean ellos. Pero hay pocas probabilidades de que los saquen en un telediario, ya saben. Por eso comparto esta reflexión para que nos unamos a esa búsqueda de la alegría tan necesaria como imprescindible. Quizá nos demos cuenta de que es necesario apagar un poco las pantallas, dejar de consumir como posesos, caminar un poquito más lentos, salir a tomar aire con más frecuencia y volver la mirada hacia lo bello, bueno y verdadero. No es difícil, tan solo hay que querer.

Nikos Kazantzakis

"Sé humilde, sé simple. Inclínate ante la grandeza de una flor, de una nube, de un insecto. No seas nada. No seas nadie. Sé literalmente una nada. Y cuando estés completamente vacío, el recipiente se podrá llenar de todo lo que realmente eres”.

Chris Dunn ilustration

13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings

More fluid reflections on keeping a solid center. BY MARIA POPOVA On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. It was then, and continues to be, a labor of love and ledger of curiosity, although the mind and heart from which it sprang have changed — have grown, I hope — tremendously. At the end of the first decade, I told its improbable origin story and drew from its evolution the ten most important things this all-consuming daily endeavor taught me about writing and living — largely notes to myself, perhaps best thought of as resolutions in reverse, that may or may not be useful to others. Now, as Brain Pickings turns thirteen — the age at which, at least in the Germanic languages, childhood tips to adolescence; the age at which I first competed in the European Math Olympics; the legal marriage age in my homeland; the number of British colonies that germinated the United States; the number of moons revolving around Neptune; a handsome prime number — I feel compelled to add three more learnings from the past three years, which have been in some ways the most difficult and in some ways the most beautiful of my life; the years in which I made the things of which I am proudest: created The Universe in Verse, composed Figuring, and finally published, after eight years of labor, A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. With dad, year 0 With dad, year 0 Here are the initial ten learnings, as published in 2016, which I continue to stand and live by: Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs? When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance. And here are the three new additions, which refine some of the subtler ideas and ideals contemplated above: A reflection originally offered on the cusp of Year 11, by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more. And since Brain Pickings is the public record of what I privately think and feel and worry and wonder about daily, here is a time machine of thought and feeling via thirteen of the pieces I have most enjoyed writing these past thirteen years: The More Loving One Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage Love, Lunacy, and a Life Fully Lived: Oliver Sacks, the Science of Seeing, and the Art of Being Seen Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert Patti Smith on Time, Transformation, and How the Radiance of Love Redeems the Rupture of Loss Salvation by Words: Iris Murdoch on Language as a Vehicle of Truth and Art as a Force of Resistance to Tyranny A Brave and Startling Truth: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan donating = loving

Unabhängigkeit.

Cómo me gusta el término alemán para designar la independencia: Unabhängigkeit. Literalmente, la capacidad para no "engancharse" de nada.

la felicidad

humildad

la opcion de no tener hijos

La decisión meditada de no tener hijos es también una opción política. A veces, la mejor manera de "crear descendencia" es intentar paliar el sufrimiento y el dolor de los que ya estamos aquí, y luchar por la existencia y desarrollo de estructuras sociales justas y de igualdad.