Stop reading the news

 

 

The news is an addictive substance that rewires our brains. We are too weak to dip in and out. The only option is ‘radical abstinence’ and the books suggests an initial decontamination period of thirty days to see the effects. The result is a calmer mental life, more time, and the chance to be truly educated and empowered.

 

Click for a preview or listen to the complete audiobook here

 

This book consists of 33 very short chapters, most of which make a separate argument for giving up the news. The titles are things like ‘News is to the Mind What Sugar is to the Body’, ‘News Kills Creativity’, ‘News is Invented by Journalists’, ‘News Encourages Terrorism’.

By all means, stay informed – just not through the news. Read books – twice. Read textbooks! Seek out investigative journalism and analysis of current affairs in periodicals. Make time for conversations with intelligent people. We’re even encouraged to use the internet, as long as we can avoid news sites. The news feeds us facts without context and says little about the slow and hidden processes that really shape the world. The news obscures the truths. The news makes us stupider.

I leave the final word to the author of the book, Rolf Dobelli:

 

 

That's it from me. It's seven o'clock in the evening. Time for the news!

 

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It's a grey and rain-filled morning at "Riverbend"

 

 

It's a grey and rain-filled not-so-SUN-day morning at "Riverbend", but I don't mind because we needed the rain and it gives me time to catch up with my reading. What to read on a melancholic day?

Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter, comes to mind. His best-known works include "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha", and "The Glass Bead Game", each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. Watch this YouTube clip:

 

 

The film is a moving documentary, filled with photos and video clips of Hesse's intense yet simple attempt to find meaning in his life. He indicated in his writings that his life had two pursuits: the need for solitude, and the need to communicate. To meet his need for solitude, he spent much of his life in the remote village of Montagnola, Switzerland (which towards the end of his life became a major tourist attraction, which he often lamented in his works). To meet his need to communicate, his house became a major asylum for German-born artists during the Nazi regime in Germany, as well as the many admirers of his works throughout his life. The video includes interviews with his two sons, his editor, and the doctor who examined him after his death.

Highly moving, Hermann Hesse’s "Long Summer" truly captures some of the author’s intensity and need for simplicity throughout his life. He liked the simple life of gardening and pulling weeds, and stated in his letters that he found most of his inspiration during this type of work. Hesse also answered over 35,000 letters during his lifetime, part of his need to communicate with others. He also dabbled with painting and artwork, which is featured throughout the video.

 

Read a tattered old copy here

 

Well, it's almost 10 a.m. and my ennui (best said with a stuffy nose) continues as I start to read "The Journey to the East", which is a small book about a very large human wish: the wish to find a path that gives life unity and purpose. It shows that people can become lost even while seeking truth. It also suggests that meaning may return through humility, faithful work, and a new way of looking at others. The novel does not offer one simple lesson. Instead, it invites the reader to ask better questions. My own question will soon be: "What's for lunch?"

 

 

As for the rain, it hasn't stopped! What has stopped is a houseboat that has anchored - to use the nautical term - on the other side of the river (as seen just below the overhanging tree branches). Its occupants hired it for a weekend ON the water, not IN the water. I hope they brought along enough books to read. "Fifty Shades of Grey" comes to mind.

 

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Theroux needs no more than three or four brush strokes of his pen to complete the most vivid of pictures

 

 

Dollar for dollar, hour per hour, a travel book is the cheapest and easiest way to transport you from the world you know into one you don't. I had already read Paul Theroux's "The Great Railway Bazaar", but while that was just another travel tome, the absorbing and beautifully written follow-up "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" gave me this sudden "epiphany", this profound moment of recognition, when my own experience of forty-four years ago - thirty-three years for Paul Theroux - was reflected back at me.

"... I had just finished a book," writes Paul Theroux, "and was out of ideas. I had no income ... I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. 'I'll be back as soon as I can.'"

And so it was with me: I had just finished another consulting assigment in Papua New Guinea, and was back in what was then my hometown, Townsville, without an income, and I had to go when the offer came in for a new assigment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. "I'll get you to join me as soon as possible," I told her.

"It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones," writes Paul Theroux. "I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls ... I was homesick the whole way - four and half months of it - and wondered if I was being missed ... I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced."

By the time I returned to Australia eight months later, clutching her visa and ticket to take her back to Saudi Arabia with me, I also almost went insane. I also had not been missed and, I guessed, had been replaced.

Paul Theroux writes, "Instead of killing anyone, or threatening it anymore, I sat in my room and wrote in a fury, abusing my typewriter, trying to lose myself in the book ... it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most ... I was cured of misery by more work."

After my return to Saudi Arabia, I, too, threw myself back into my work. I regretted that, in accepting this job, I had lost what I valued most. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I just worked and worked. Weeks later I woke up in the intensive care unit of a Jeddah hospital with a drip in my arm and a breathing mask over my face, realising what it must be like to be dead: people might miss you, but their lives go on without you.

And when Paul Theroux writes, "Some betrayals are forgivable, but others you never quite recover from," he makes me relive, with just a few brush strokes of his pen, much of the pain I thought I'd forgotten.

 

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Status Anxiety

 

 

Instead of being born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I found myself with a knife in my back after my parents' messy divorce, which was followed by my constant shuttling from one to the other. The only status I hoped to achieve was the status quo.

The only status anxiety I ever suffered from was financial insecurity. I worked hard to cure me of it, and I achieved it, perhaps sooner than most, because I bought things for their utility, never for their status.

I still remember with great fondness - and even greater regret that I ever left - my first real "home" I bought at 3 Bay Street, Pallarenda in Townsville. It cost me thirty thousand dollars which was even in 1981 a very low price for what was undoubtedly the most modest house in the street, but to me it was the most comfortable home I had ever known.

There was only one time when I did not buy something for its utility, and that was in 1984 when, in a mad rush of blood to the head (and possibly to impress the company I was keeping then), I outlaid some $2,500 - which was then close to two months' average wages in Australia - for a ROLEX Oyster Perpetual which I never wear when I drive into town now.

When I do drive into town - which is no more than once a week when it coincides with our visit to the warm-water pool - I drive in my modest $18,000-drive-away MG3 and I shop for books at Vinnies and the Salvos, where some time ago I found Alain de Botton's book "Status Anxiety".

 

 

The book didn't teach me anything that I did't already know from watching many of my neighbours, but it was reassuring to have my view of the world confirmed. The author himself suffers no status anxiety as he has a personal net worth of £20 million to £30 million, earned from his philosophy and lifestyle books, all of which became international bestsellers and have been translated into over thirty languages.

 

 

Unfortunately, there is no free online copy of "Status Anxiety" on the internet, but I can assure you that buying yourself a copy of the book on ebay for a modest $20 will give you many hours of reading pleasure - although it won't necessarily add to your status, except in my eyes.

 

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Zorba the Greek

 

 

There used to be a video clip on YouTube which shows Basil, the buttoned-up young intellectual, meeting Zorba on a rained-out day inside a taverna on the Piraeus waterfront. Unfortunately, it's gone, as is the full-length movie.

It is my favourite scene of the whole movie, as I myself had spent many such rained-out days in perhaps the very same taverna when I lived and worked in Piraeus, but times and I have changed. I am now also caught in "the full catastrophe", which makes the above clip more appropriate.

 

The film's theme music played on two santuris

 

"Zorba the Greek" is a wonderful tale of a young man's coming of age, and has been a classic of world literature since it was first translated into English in 1952 and made into an unforgettable movie with Anthony Quinn. Zorba, an irrepressible, earthy hedonist, sweeps his young disciple along as he wines, dines, dances and loves his way through a life which is dedicated to fulfilling his copious appetites.

 

 

The sun is out and warming up the day. At the risk of making me feel even more melancholic, I have grabbed a big bottle of retsina, Nikos Kazantzaki's marvellous book, and my mp3-player to drink, read and listen myself through another glorious morning of "Riverbend" idleness.

 

 

Continue reading here

 

Continue reading here

 

Η δόξα που ήταν η Ελλάδα !

 

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P.S. There are several websites that allow you to convert YouTube clips to mp3 files for free. Some limit their conversions to just half an hour, others to four hours. I have just found PullMP3 that offers unlimited conversions and relies on the occasional donation which I gladly give.