Monday 28 November 2011

The News From Nowhere


I saw a quote by Alan Bennett on the tube yesterday about how when you read something that is a true expression of what you feel it is as if a hand is been held out to you......

Concerning Love: Chapter XI

So we shake off these griefs in a way which perhaps the sentimentalists of other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike. As on the other hand therefore we have ceased to be commercial in our love matters, so also we have ceased to be artificially foolish. The folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man caught in a trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of it.; but to be concentionally sensitive or sentimental- my friend I am old and disappointed but at least I think we have cast off some of the follies of the older world.
(William Morris)

Or as Rev Jim Robinson says:

There is a proverb which goes, "you cannot get enough of what you don't really need." If we were driven to need more sex, more money, more control., more chocolate, more anything in order to be happy then we will never be able to get enough of it. We will destroy lives in a frantic effort to get more and more of what cannot make us happy. Fortunately, (sooner or later) our bad habits inevitably meet the midnight hour. When our house of cards collapses, when we no longer avoid the pain in our shadow, when our obsessions reveal themselves as the dysfunctions the are, then we have a chance to do something different. We may discover a happiness which is not grandiose or addictive but arises from spiritual understanding.



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