Shirley Bassey Music and Vids 1973 (Royal Albert Hall Concert) ABOUT this song: This Is My Life (La vita) is a 1968 album by Shirley Bassey that was released in Italy on the United Artists label (UA 9035). Bassey had started living as a tax exile in 1968, and was not permitted to work in Britain for two years.[1][2] In 1968 Bassey performed at the Sanremo Music Festival in Italy singing the song “La vita.”[3] This song was originally written by Bruno Canfora, with (Italian) lyrics by Antonio Amurri. For the song Bassey sang at the festival, the lyrics were partially rewritten in English by Norman Newell. Side one of the album included only Italian songs with the exception of “La vita” which is the version with a mix of Italian and English lyrics. Side two is an edited version of the This Is My Life album that was released in Britain and the USA, with the addition of “To Give” which was only included in this album and on a single. Of the six songs recorded in Italian on this album only “La vita” has had a CD release. It appeared on the 1994 boxset Bassey – The EMI/UA Years 1959 – 1979. While in exile Bassey recorded several songs that were exclusively released in Italy and also performed frequently on Italian television. In the next step in the evolution of “La vita,” Newell wrote English lyrics for the remaining Italian parts and the result was “This Is My Life.” This English-only version became one of Bassey’s signature songs, often the final encore that she performs in concert.
Funny how a lonely day, can make a person say What good is my life Funny how a breaking heart, can make me start to say What good is my life Funny how I often seem, to think I’ll find never another dream In my life Till I look around and see, this great big world is part of me And my life This is my life Today, tomorrow, love will come and find me But that’s the way that I was born to be This is me This is me This is my life And I don’t give a damn for lost emotions I’ve such a lot of love I’ve got to give Let me live Let me live Sometime when I feel afraid, I think of what a mess I’ve made Of my life Crying over my mistakes, forgetting all the breaks I’ve had In my life I was put on earth to be, a part of this great world is me And my life Guess I’ll just add up the score, and count the things I’m grateful for In my life This Is my life Today, tomorrow, love will come and find me But that’s the way that I was born to be This is me This is me This is my life And I don’t give a damn for lost emotions I’ve such a lot of love I’ve got to give Let me live Let me live This is my life This is my life This is my life
Carl Jung once made the tragically accurate statement that Hitler was akin to the mouthpiece of the collective unconscious for the German people.
It is more common to think — as well as nicer to think — that Hitler was simply a madman run amok on Germany and that his influence alone spoke for all of Nazism in its crazed, manic, ruthless aspects. “He was evil,” people say, their eyes widened, their heads shaking in disbelief, and they leave it at that.
And while certainly true that Hitler was an evil man, this cannot account for the whole of the frenzy that swept Germany at the time. It conveniently goes unmentioned that Hitler came to power in a perfectly constitutional manner. A sizable portion of the nation had rallied behind him completely by their own accord. It is not sufficient to pile all explanations for the rise of Nazism on a single, deceased man and to bemoan that such a tragedy is a shameful pocket of history that simply “cannot be comprehended”.
I don’t think that’s true at all; I think most of us don’t want to understand it because in doing so, we might have to face some uncomfortable truths about the dark parts of ourselves and humanity at large. (But more on this later.)
Crippled by the aftermath of WWI, the Germans were weak and apathetic, societally a bit disbanded. They were robbed of the intense fervor of war almost overnight and what arrived in its place was humiliation; a crushing defeat. They were a proud people and this sort of merciless crumpling of their honor bred resentment, resentment that festered in the individual souls of the nation’s people.
The economic ruin and chaos only exacerbated the hopelessness. It is important to remember that Hitler did not organically produce all this resentment that led to the Nazis gaining power and plowing over Europe in the coming decade(s). It is, if you put yourself in their shoes, quite easy to imagine how the German people could have become bitter and vengeful when the rest of Europe after WWI had gutted the entire country of their savings, their well-being and their sense of national honor.
Hitler merely channeled those emotions that had been brewing under the surface of the mass psyche in an extremely exploitative manner that, as we know, led to wretched calamity. If anything, Hitler was a collaborator with the sentiment of the masses rather than an authoritarian figure that used brute force to get people to subscribe to his vision. He shrewdly served as a placeholder for national resentment and positioned himself as the national voice accordingly — amplifying, coalescing, and clarifying this resentment and channeling it into a veritable, formidable movement.
There were two things the Germans really wanted at this crucial juncture in history: They wanted revenge, but they also lusted after order. Broadly speaking, order has always been a particular hunger for the Germans who historically valued structure and rigidity and efficiency. Post-war Germany lacked order and was too disillusioned to practically, successfully, collect their revenge and channel it into something without the help of a fervent, charismatic leader.
That such an extremist movement arrived on the frontlines of the German political scene and was allowed to completely restructure the nation is very telling in that the Germans were so eager for a new, robust identity that the overwhelming majority of them essentially sacrificed themselves to the Nazi ideal.
They laid down their individual identities at the feet of Hitler, sacrificing themselves for the collective identity of the Third Reich. Their moral consciences in many cases proved hardly resilient to the repugnant aspects of Nazism and thus, were effortlessly overrun. (And that should be a warning to us all.)
Such is the inherent danger of strongly identitarian ideologies, particularly when the people in question do not have a durable, self-aware identity themselves and a certain moral culpability to match.
Strong undercurrents of obedience, duty and conformity ran in German culture, plus a kind of Prussian puritanism as well. There existed the superior ideals of hardening oneself to the world and carrying out duty above all else. The strict and rigid culture that Nazism intensified engendered paranoia among the people. Paranoia, it should be noted, is an aspect of every totalitarian society because it is a check for conformity, a subtle means of control. And thus, in Nazi Germany, individual identity was often obliterated both horizontally (via conformity) as well as vertically (via the authoritarian call to national duty above all else).
What is so chillingly remarkable about Nazism’s success was that the conventional political script was flipped. Instead of espousing promises, like all other political figures and movements attempt to do, Hitler promulgated demands.
He did not address the public from the podium lavishing them with lofty promises of this or that, so much as he called upon the German people to throw themselves into the Nazi effort for the sake of their homeland. And they did! It was unprecedented, a profound psychological feat. The response he gained from the people was fevered and enthusiastic. He spoke to them with religious-style charisma and they gave him their souls!
There’s something to say, I think, for the kind of collective demands made of the German community in this era as being very psychologically satiating. Indeed, all indications suggest that many Germans welcomed this grafting of purpose onto their lives with open arms. Imbued with a revolutionary and transcendent sense of purpose, the public were blind to the hijacking of their minds.
Hitler did not so much have to “win people over” with politician schmooze and intellectual persuasion. No, he was the collective unconscious of the German people writ large. Subsequently, Germany transformed into a veritable Nazi war machine and all of daily life became inundated with Nazi politics. Society was absolutely stricken by the power of politics and anything else — moral concerns, original thinking, opposing opinions — had been almost voluntarily hushed, intimidated into hiding.
What strikes me as a bit haunting about Nazism in particular is that so much of the nation willingly identified with this extremist system that carried out ethically contemptuous deeds and they believed in it exuberantly and by their own volition! (Which is to say, not purely out of state coercion, as in many other authoritarian systems.)
What then, does that tell us about the human condition? Perhaps that we are more easily overcome by a vigorous ideology that gifts us with purpose than we’d like to think. There’s ways to prevent this and grounding yourself strongly in your own moral identity is a significant part of this.
In applying these revelations to the present, if so many of us feel purposeless in our daily lives, are we not more susceptible to this sort of thing? Even more so if we’re ineffectual and lackadaisical and don’t have strong personal belief systems. (I have a suspicion that a lot of people don’t have strong personal belief systems and instead rely entirely on an ethos of “anything goes”, moral relativity, and radical tolerance which can be just as dangerous, but that’s another topic.) A society is in profound danger if the people that constitute that society do not have a healthy individuality coupled with a moral identity and a vigilant self-awareness.
And so here’s my somewhat-challenging final thoughts: Why do you think Nazism happened? How could an entire nation be caught up in such a collective frenzy and how could they do such evil things in good conscience? How do they go along with it? The answers lie in confronting the dark recesses of the human condition.
Decades removed from this catastrophe, people automatically feel inclined, with a weary sigh and a confused shake of their heads to lament — “I just don’t understand,” as if they really are some exemplar of unsullied human morality that fundamentally can’t comprehend the dark, destructive impulses that threaded through Nazism in those days. What does that really mean — not understanding?
There’s reason to be skeptical of people that trot out this line too frequently; it’s very telling if they do. ‘I don’t understand’ is not a satisfying answer at all to these quandaries. And it’s not even an answer at all; it’s a non-answer. It’s a refusal to engage with anything even mildly distressing about the catastrophic and evil impulses in humanity.
Nobody wants to believe that if they lived in 1930s Germany that they would have been swept into the Nazi movement themselves. Nobody wants to entertain that notion! They step away from it, they’re taken aback and suddenly their reasoning abilities are fuzzy and they cannot coexist with this question without throwing it out the window as oh-so-conveniently indecipherable. (Granted not all of those in Germany at the time did fall under the spell but the majority did and many eventually joined the cause when they at first were adamantly against it.) But, really, who’s to say that you would not have been? And for that matter, who’s to say that you wouldn’t have been complicit in any manner of horrifying regimes over the course of humanity?
If you can’t recognize the monstrous part hidden inside of you and then subsequently tame it, then who’s to say you won’t become a monster yourself? It’s a perfectly absurd thing, if you think about, to hypothetically insinuate that you have no capacity to comprehend the evil things that mankind has done. Who are you to think you’re immune from that? You’re human, so you’re guaranteed to have some fiber of evil inside of you and if you can’t accept that, then who are you, God himself? If you sit still long enough and honestly, carefully truthfully think — think, that is, not judge — I believe most people would understand. There’s a capacity for evil in everyone and frankly, an appetite as well if not tamed, if the timeline of history itself isn’t already flagrant evidence of this.
It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that famously said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. Though we may not want to face this haunting truth, it is reality. And we will do ourselves more damage if we avoid awareness of this notion and neglect to recognize this part of ourselves in our private, individual minds. Humans have the frightening capability to be very dangerous creatures indeed but better for us to tame that nature individually than to be led into someone or something exploiting this in us, wrecking havoc on history’s stage.
From Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York
(mskcc.org)
Mind-body therapies are a group of healing techniques that enhance the mind’s interactions with bodily function, to induce relaxation and to improve overall health and well-being. Daily practice is essential for deriving benefit from these therapies, which have become increasingly popular over the last two decades. A growing body of research indicates that mind-body therapies are safe and effective ways of mitigating physical and emotional symptoms, and improving coping skills in cancer patients. Because these practices are pleasant, noninvasive and beneficial, they are most suited for patients and survivors to help manage their own care.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s About Mind-Body Therapies database, a tool for the public as well as healthcare professionals, can help you evaluate the benefits of mind-body interventions. The database is continually updated to provide you with objective and evidence-based information.
Acupuncture is a therapeutic component of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It involves the use of very thin needles along with heat, pressure, or electricity to stimulate points on the body, promoting the flow and balance of internal energy. Acupuncture can help treat chronic pain and some symptoms associated with cancer treatment.
Aromatherapy uses the scent of concentrated plant oils, known as essential oils, to improve feelings of well-being. It is a popular complementary therapy used to relieve stress and produce other pleasant sensations.
Massage is effective in reducing symptoms associated with cancer such as pain and anxiety. Current oncology guidelines recommend using massage for depression and mood disorders. Massage is generally safe and increasingly used as a complementary therapy to provide relief from certain symptoms of cancer and other illnesses.
Meditation practices involve using the mind to focus one’s attention, regulate breathing, and develop a non-judgmental awareness of thoughts and feelings to achieve inner calmness, physical relaxation, psychological balance, and improved vitality and coping.
Music therapy can promote relaxation, distract from pain associated with many illnesses, and relieve distress. It can also strengthen and enrich communications and provide support to loved ones. Supportive care guidelines recommend music therapy to help reduce anxiety, depression, and mood disorders. Therapists are skilled at employing evidence-based techniques for symptom management in clinical, intensive care, and hospice settings.
Qigong, a practice developed in China, integrates body movement, muscle relaxation, and breathing exercises to improve physical, emotional, and psychological health.
An ancient Chinese tradition, tai chi is an exercise program that uses a sequence of precise body movements, meditation, and synchronized breathing to improve health and well-being.
Yoga was first described in the Vedic texts of India several thousand years ago. People practice its simple breathing exercises, physical postures, and meditation techniques to promote health and relaxation.
Carl Reiner (March 20, 1922 – June 29, 2020) was an American actor, comedian, director, screenwriter, and author whose career spanned seven decades. During the early years of television comedy from 1950 to 1957, he acted on and contributed sketch material for Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, starring Sid Caesar. In the 1960s, Reiner was best known as the creator, producer, writer, and actor on The Dick Van Dyke Show.[1][2]
Reiner appeared in dozens of television specials from 1967 to 2000 and was a guest star on television series from the 1950s to 2000.[3] He also voiced characters in film and animated films, and was a reader for books on tape. He wrote more than two dozen books, mostly in his later years.
Carl Reiner was born on March 20, 1922, in the Bronx, New York City. His father Irving Reiner was a watchmaker; his mother was Bessie (née Mathias) Reiner.[7][8][9] His parents were Jewish immigrants; his father was from Austria and his mother Romania.[10] His older brother Charlie served in the 9th Division in World War II; his ashes are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.[11]
When he was 16, Carl was working as a machinist repairing sewing machines. His brother Charlie read about a free drama workshop sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and told Carl about it. Carl later credited Charlie with his decision to change careers.[12][13] His uncle Harry Mathias was the first entertainer in his family.[14]
Military service
Reiner was drafted into the United States Army Air Forces on October 27, 1942,[15] and served during World War II, eventually achieving the rank of corporal by the end of the war.[16] He initially trained to be a radio operator. After spending three months in the hospital recovering from pneumonia, he was sent to Georgetown University for ten months of training as a French interpreter. There he had his first experience as a director, putting on a Molière play entirely in French. After completing language training in 1944, he was sent to Hawaii to work as a teleprinter operator. The night before he was scheduled to ship out for an unknown assignment, he attended a production of Hamlet by the Special Services entertainment unit. Following an audition before actor and majorMaurice Evans, he was transferred to Special Services. Over the following two years, Reiner performed around the Pacific theater, entertaining troops in Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima until he was honorably discharged in 1946.[16]
Starting in 1960, Reiner teamed with Brooks as a comedy duo on The Steve Allen Show. Their performances on television and stage included Reiner playing the straight man in 2000 Year Old Man.[19] Eventually, the routine expanded into a series of 5 comedy albums and a 1975 animated television special, with the last album in the series winning a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Comedy Album.[19][20] The act gave Brooks “an identity as a comic performer for the first time,” said Reiner.[21] Brooks’s biographer, William Holtzman, called their 12-minute act “an ingenious jazz improvisation …”,[21] while Gerald Nachman described Reiner’s part in guiding the act:
The routine relies totally on the team’s mental agility and chemistry. It’s almost heresy to imagine Brooks performing it with any other straight man. Reiner was a solid straight man to Caesar, but with Brooks he is the second-banana supreme…guiding his partner’s churning comic mind.[21][22]
In 1958, Reiner wrote the initial 13 episodes of a television series titled Head of the Family, based on his own personal and professional life. However, the network did not like Reiner in the lead role for unknown reasons.[17] In 1961, the show was recast and re-titled The Dick Van Dyke Show and became an iconic series, making stars of his lead actors Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. In addition to writing many of the episodes, Reiner occasionally appeared as temperamental show host Alan Brady.[17] The series ran from 1961 to 1966 and thereafter entered a long run of syndication.[17] In 1966, Reiner co-starred in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.[23]
Reiner’s first film directorial effort was an adaptation of Joseph Stein‘s play Enter Laughing (1967), which, in turn, was based on Reiner’s semi-autobiographical 1958 novel of the same name.[6] Balancing directing, producing, writing, and acting, Reiner worked on a wide range of films and television programs. Films from his early directing career include Where’s Poppa? (1970), Oh, God! (1977), and The Jerk (1979).[24][25][26]
In My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir (2003), he writes:
Of all the films I have directed, only Where’s Poppa? is universally acknowledged as a cult classic. A cult classic, as you may know, is a film that was seen by a small minority of the world’s film goers, who insist it is one of the greatest, most daring, and innovative moving pictures ever made. Whenever two or more cult members meet, they will quote dialogue from the classic and agree that “the film was ahead of its time.” To be designated a genuine cult classic, it is of primary importance that the film fail to earn back the cost of making, marketing, and distributing it. Where’s Poppa? was made in 1969 for a little over $1 million. According to the last distribution statements I saw, it will not break even until it earns another $650,000.[27]
Reiner played a large role in the early career of Steve Martin by directing his first film, The Jerk (1979), and co-writing and directing the comedian in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), The Man with Two Brains (1983), and All of Me (1984).[28] Reiner also appeared in both The Jerk, playing a version of himself, and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. In 1989, he directed Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool.[29]Reiner with Dick Van Dyke in 2000
Reiner appeared in dozens of television specials from 1967 to 2000.[3] He also guest starred in television series from the 1950s to 2000.[3] In May 2009, Reiner guest starred as a clinic patient in “Both Sides Now“, the season five finale of House.[34] He also voiced Santa in Merry Madagascar (2009)[35] and reprised his role in the Penguins of Madagascar episode “The All Nighter Before Christmas” (2010).[36] In season 7 (December 2009) of Two and a Half Men, he guest-starred as television producer Marty Pepper.[37] In 2010, he guest starred in three of the first-season episodes of Hot in Cleveland as Elka Ostrovsky’s (Betty White) date and reprised the role in February 2011.[38] He also made appearances in The Cleveland Show as Murray[39] and wrote the story for the episode “Your Show of Shows“, named after the program that started his career. Reiner reprised his role on Two and a Half Men in seasons 8 (October 2013) and 11 (January 2014).[37]
In 2012, Reiner appeared as a guest on Jerry Seinfeld‘s show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. They talked at a diner about his comedy career and Reiner invited Jerry to come and have dinner with Mel Brooks and himself. Reiner reported that every night, Brooks headed to his house to eat, watch Jeopardy (he taped it) and watch movies. He went on to offer the one rule for movies was that it had to be one where “somebody says, ‘Secure the perimeter!’ or ‘Get some rest.'” Brooks “falls asleep with his mouth open” every time.[40]
Reiner was the author of more than two dozen books.[41] His first autobiographical novel, Enter Laughing (1958), led to a 1995 sequel, Continue Laughing. He published a memoir, My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir, in 2003.[42] He also wrote a humorous series of memoirs under the titles I Remember Me (2012), I Just Remembered (2014), and What I Forgot To Remember (2015), along with books about film and art. He began writing children’s books based on the stories he used to tell a certain grandchild who would request, “Tell me a scary story, Grandpa, but not too scary”.[43]
Online
Reiner joined Twitter in 2012, tweeting that he was doing so to keep up with his grandson, Jake.[44] He felt obliged to post at least once per day, and so posted 6,520 tweets and accumulated 367,000 followers.[44] His favorite topics were movies and Donald Trump, but his last tweet was a reminiscence about Noël Coward performing in Las Vegas.[44]
His final interview was a webisode of Dispatches From Quarantine which was posted on YouTube by the Jewish arts organisation, Reboot, and Temple Beth Am.[45][46] In this, he reminisced about his wife and family, “We met, fell in love, and I was 20 at the time and she was 28, and people said this is not a match … It only worked for 65 years, and if she didn’t pass on we’d still be working on it.”[45]
Approach to comedy writing
Reiner expressed his philosophy on writing comedy in an interview in the December 1981 issue of American Film:
You have to imagine yourself as not somebody very special, but somebody very ordinary. If you imagine yourself as somebody really normal and if it makes you laugh, it’s going to make everybody laugh. If you think of yourself as something very special, you’ll end up a pedant and a bore. If you start thinking about what’s funny, you won’t be funny, actually. It’s like walking. How do you walk? If you start thinking about it, you’ll trip.[3]
Personal life
Rob and Carl Reiner in 2008
On December 24, 1943, Reiner married singer Estelle Lebost. The two were married for almost 65 years until her death in October 2008.[47][48] Estelle delivered the line “I’ll have what she’s having” in the deli scene of their son Rob‘s 1989 film When Harry Met Sally….[8] They were the parents of Rob Reiner (b. 1947); poet, playwright, and author Annie Reiner (b. 1949); and painter,[49] actor, and director Lucas Reiner (b. 1960).[8]
Reiner described himself as a Jewish atheist.[10] He said, “I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.”[50][51] He said in 2013 he developed an atheistic viewpoint as the Holocaust progressed.[52]
From 1974 until 2001, Reiner sponsored the Carl Reiner Charity Celebrity Tennis Tournament in La Costa. CA. directed by International Tennis Player, Mike Franks, that was played yearly over three days and included 400 players of which 100 were professionals.
On June 29, 2020 at the age of 98, Reiner died of natural causes at his home,[54] in the company of his family.[55][56]
Diogenes was a controversial figure. His father minted coins for a living, and Diogenes was banished from Sinope when he took to debasement of currency.[1] After being exiled, he moved to Athens and criticized many cultural conventions of the city. He modelled himself on the example of Heracles, and believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used his simple lifestyle and behaviour to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt, confused society. He had a reputation for sleeping and eating wherever he chose in a highly non-traditional fashion, and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the world rather than claiming allegiance to just one place. There are many tales about his dogging Antisthenes‘ footsteps and becoming his “faithful hound”.[3]Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man (1640-1647) byGiovanni Benedetto Castiglione held at the National Gallery of Art
Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and often slept in a large ceramic jar, or pithos, in the marketplace.[4] He became notorious for his philosophical stunts, such as carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He criticized Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates, and sabotaged his lectures, sometimes distracting listeners by bringing food and eating during the discussions. Diogenes was also noted for having mocked Alexander the Great, both in public and to his face when he visited Corinth in 336 BC.[5][6][7]
Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold into slavery, eventually settling in Corinth. There he passed his philosophy of Cynicism to Crates, who taught it to Zeno of Citium, who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring schools of Greek philosophy. No writings of Diogenes are known but there are some details of his life from anecdotes (chreia), especially from Diogenes Laërtius‘ book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and some other sources.[8]
Life
Nothing is known about Diogenes’ early life except that his father, Hicesias, was a banker.[9] It seems likely that Diogenes was also enrolled into the banking business aiding his father.
At some point (the exact date is unknown), Hicesias and Diogenes became involved in a scandal involving the adulteration or debasement of the currency,[10] and Diogenes was exiled from the city and lost his citizenship and all his material possessions.[11][12] This aspect of the story seems to be corroborated by archaeology: large numbers of defaced coins (smashed with a large chisel stamp) have been discovered at Sinope dating from the middle of the 4th century BC, and other coins of the time bear the name of Hicesias as the official who minted them.[13] During this time there was much counterfeit money circulating in Sinope.[11] The coins were deliberately defaced in order to render them worthless as legal tender.[11] Sinope was being disputed between pro-Persian and pro-Greek factions in the 4th century, and there may have been political rather than financial motives behind the act.
According to one story,[12] Diogenes went to the Oracle at Delphi to ask for her advice and was told that he should “deface the currency”. Following the debacle in Sinope, Diogenes decided that the oracle meant that he should deface the political currency rather than actual coins. He traveled to Athens and made it his life’s goal to challenge established customs and values. He argued that instead of being troubled about the true nature of evil, people merely rely on customary interpretations. This distinction between nature (“physis“) and custom (“nomos“) is a favourite theme of ancient Greek philosophy, and one that Plato takes up in The Republic, in the legend of the Ring of Gyges.[14]
Diogenes arrived in Athens with a slave named Manes who escaped from him shortly thereafter. With characteristic humor, Diogenes dismissed his ill fortune by saying, “If Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?”[15] Diogenes would mock such a relation of extreme dependency. He found the figure of a master who could do nothing for himself contemptibly helpless. He was attracted by the ascetic teaching of Antisthenes, a student of Socrates. When Diogenes asked Antisthenes to mentor him, Antisthenes ignored him and reportedly “eventually beat him off with his staff”.[1] Diogenes responds, “Strike, for you will find no wood hard enough to keep me away from you, so long as I think you’ve something to say.”[1] Diogenes became Antisthenes’ pupil, despite the brutality with which he was initially received.[16] Whether the two ever really met is still uncertain,[17][18][19] but he surpassed his master in both reputation and the austerity of his life. He considered his avoidance of earthly pleasures a contrast to and commentary on contemporary Athenian behaviors. This attitude was grounded in a disdain for what he regarded as the folly, pretence, vanity, self-deception, and artificiality of human conduct.Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man, attributed to J. H. W. Tischbein (c. 1780)
The stories told of Diogenes illustrate the logical consistency of his character. He inured himself to the weather by living in a clay wine jar[4][20] belonging to the temple of Cybele.[21] He destroyed the single wooden bowl he possessed on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He then exclaimed: “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!”[22][23] It was contrary to Athenian customs to eat within the marketplace, and still he would eat there, for, as he explained when rebuked, it was during the time he was in the marketplace that he felt hungry. He used to stroll about in full daylight with a lamp; when asked what he was doing, he would answer, “I am just looking for an honest man.”[24] Diogenes looked for a human being but reputedly found nothing but rascals and scoundrels.[25]
According to Diogenes Laërtius, when Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek[26]definition of man as “featherless bipeds,” Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato’s Academy, saying, “Behold! I’ve brought you a man,” and so the Academy added “with broad flat nails” to the definition.[27]
In Corinth
According to a story which seems to have originated with Menippus of Gadara,[28] Diogenes was captured by pirates while on voyage to Aegina and sold as a slave in Crete to a Corinthian named Xeniades. Being asked his trade, he replied that he knew no trade but that of governing men, and that he wished to be sold to a man who needed a master. Xeniades liked his spirit and hired Diogenes to tutor his children. As tutor to Xeniades’s two sons,[29] it is said that he lived in Corinth for the rest of his life, which he devoted to preaching the doctrines of virtuous self-control. There are many stories about what actually happened to him after his time with Xeniades’s two sons. There are stories stating he was set free after he became “a cherished member of the household”, while one says he was set free almost immediately, and still another states that “he grew old and died at Xeniades’s house in Corinth.”[30] He is even said to have lectured to large audiences at the Isthmian Games.[31]
Although most of the stories about his living in a jar[4] are located in Athens, there are some accounts of his living in a jar near the Craneum gymnasium in Corinth:
A report that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all Corinth into a bustle; one was furbishing his arms, another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having nothing to do—of course no one thought of giving him a job—was moved by the sight to gather up his philosopher’s cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: “I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like the rest.”[32]
Diogenes and Alexander
Alexander the Great Visits Diogenes at Corinth by W. Matthews (1914)Main article: Diogenes and Alexander
It was in Corinth that a meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes is supposed to have taken place.[33] These stories may be apocryphal. The accounts of Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius recount that they exchanged only a few words: while Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunlight.” Alexander then declared, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” “If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes,” Diogenes replied.[5][6][7] In another account of the conversation, Alexander found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”[34]
Death
There are conflicting accounts of Diogenes’ death. His contemporaries alleged he had held his breath until he expired; although other accounts of his death say he had become ill from eating raw octopus;[35] or to have suffered an infected dog bite.[36] When asked how he wished to be buried, he left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, “Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!” When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied: “If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?”[37] In the end, Diogenes made fun of people’s excessive concern with the “proper” treatment of the dead. The Corinthians erected to his memory a pillar on which rested a dog of Parian marble.[38]
Along with Antisthenes and Crates of Thebes, Diogenes is considered one of the founders of Cynicism. The ideas of Diogenes, like those of most other Cynics, must be arrived at indirectly. No writings of Diogenes survive even though he is reported to have authored over ten books, a volume of letters and seven tragedies.[39] Cynic ideas are inseparable from Cynic practice; therefore what we know about Diogenes is contained in anecdotes concerning his life and sayings attributed to him in a number of scattered classical sources.
Diogenes maintained that all the artificial growths of society were incompatible with happiness and that morality implies a return to the simplicity of nature. So great was his austerity and simplicity that the Stoics would later claim him to be a wise man or “sophos”. In his words, “Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.”[40] Although Socrates had previously identified himself as belonging to the world, rather than a city,[41] Diogenes is credited with the first known use of the word “cosmopolitan“. When he was asked from where he came, he replied, “I am a citizen of the world (cosmopolites)”.[42] This was a radical claim in a world where a man’s identity was intimately tied to his citizenship of a particular city-state. An exile and an outcast, a man with no social identity, Diogenes made a mark on his contemporaries.Plato and Diogenes (17th century) by Mattia Preti
Diogenes had nothing but disdain for Plato and his abstract philosophy.[43] Diogenes viewed Antisthenes as the true heir to Socrates, and shared his love of virtue and indifference to wealth,[44] together with a disdain for general opinion.[45] Diogenes shared Socrates’s belief that he could function as doctor to men’s souls and improve them morally, while at the same time holding contempt for their obtuseness. Plato once described Diogenes as “a Socrates gone mad.”[46]
GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Desperately attempting to free himself from a lingering sense of paranoia, local man Adreese Fowler admitted Wednesday that he just couldn’t seem to shake the creeping sensation that someone other than the government, his employer, and advertisers was watching him. “I keep getting this eerie feeling that everything I do is being monitored by a person who isn’t from the FBI, Silicon Valley, or my company’s corporate office,” said Fowler, adding that whoever was tracking him wasn’t simply engaged in comprehensive surveillance of his behavior at work and home, or harvesting his data to create a meticulously detailed profile of his personal beliefs, interests, and habits to sell to a third party. “It’s hard to articulate, but I think there’s someone out there keeping tabs on me besides Facebook, our HR department, Grand Rapids PD, and the people who make the phone I keep in my pocket and carry everywhere I go. I feel it when I’m driving, too, as if it’s not just the countless brands that pay Google to access my GPS information that are following my every move. Ugh, I get goosebumps every time I think about it.” At press time, reports confirmed the strange, uncomfortable presence Fowler had felt lurking alongside him was nothing less than God the Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, keeping watch over the man as he made his way through this world.
July 8, 2020 – By VICTOR TANGERMANN (Futurism.com)
Adventure Time
NASA’s Curiosity rover is about to embark on a new adventure at Mount Sharp, a gigantic summit on Mars. The trip, which the space agency dubbed the rover’s “summer road trip” in an official announcement, will involve crossing about a mile of Martian wasteland to get to its next section.
The rover has been exploring the unusual 3 mile-tall mountain since 2014 to look for signs of ancient microbial life. The mountain is located on the floor of the massive 96 miles across Gale Crater, what is believed to be a dried up ancient lake bed.
Still Salty
The mountain, formally known as Aeolis Mons, is made up of numerous layers of sediment that could give us clues about the formation and history of the Red Planet.
Curiosity’s next stop is what’s dubbed the “sulfate-bearing unit.” As its nickname suggests, the area holds various sulfates, including gypsum and Epsom salts, which conventionally form as water evaporates.
Autobot
But to get there, Curiosity’s road trip will take it around a treacherously sandy area to avoid the risk of getting stuck — and it will do so mostly by itself.
“Curiosity can’t drive entirely without humans in the loop,” Matt Gildner, lead rover driver at JPL, said in the announcement. “But it does have the ability to make simple decisions along the way to avoid large rocks or risky terrain. It stops if it doesn’t have enough information to complete a drive on its own.”
In a matter of weeks, if all goes well, NASA will launch its next Mars rover, Perseverance, into space on the long journey to Mars to assist in the search for ancient microbial life.
“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)
“No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings,” physicist David Bohm wrote in examining the nature of creativity, “unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be.” And yet, stranded in the purgatory between objective and subjective reality, we are often too blinded by our preconceptions to receive facts as we encounter them, the raw material of reality — something Galileo considered the greatest enemy of critical thinking as he was launching his epoch-making crusade against delusion.
Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856)
In a journal entry from the thick of winter in 1860, just before he became bedridden with what would be his final illness, the forty-three-year-old Thoreau writes:
A man receives only what he is ready to receive… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.
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