"The irony that an empire so noisily advertised as an empire of free Britons should depend on the most brutal coercion of enslaved Africans is not just an academic paradox. It was the condition of the empire's success, its original sin: a stain that no amount of righteous self-congratulation at its eventual abolition can altogether wash away."
On the turntable: Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis, "Two Men With The Blues"
"Prosperity is identical with culture. Here were people absolutely prosperous, not of great means nor yet of very small ones but having sufficient education to expand those means frugally and so as to obtain the greatest amount of rational pleasure out of life. That is the chief function of education. A society, a coterie, a nation, a civilization so equipped is bound to outlast nations or classes within a nation whose idea of prosperity—nay of culture itself—is that of material hegemony of the world."
On the turntable: Django Reinhardt, "Integrale Django Reinhardt Vol. 5"
"Sometimes it's enough to just be where your feet are."
On the turntable: Three Dog Night, "Joy to the World"
The worst of modern life is when it weakens the powers of deep thought; in the insane haste of a town like New York man cannot sit down to remember that the inner life is being paralysed; he can only remember that he is in a hurry. Nature, however, is in no hurry—she took many million years to make this puny figure hurrying down Broadway—and she can well await the coming of that time when, with a calmer life and quieter activity, he will emerge from self-inflicted disaster and agonies to gaze into the deep well of divine thought which was buried beneath the noisy surface of himself and his environment.
On the turntable: Tomoyasu Hotei, "New Beginnings"
"Liberties are not given, they are taken."
On the turntable: Yes, "Drama"
"What if we reframed 'living with uncertainty' to 'navigating mystery'? "
On the turntable: Toots and the Maytals, "The Pressure Drop"
