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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Alongside being adept in the art of war, the samurai became conversant with the refined arts of painting, poetry, music performance, theatre and tea ceremonies

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Man on wire (2008)





 
"Man on wire" is one of the best documentary films of all time

On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center.
(In the wake of 9/11, studios edited or digitally removed the World Trade Center from shots of the New York skyline in their new releases).

In this exhilarating, breathtaking documentary by British filmmaker James Marsh , the twin towers are back to celebrate one of their finest moments: the breathtaking, palm-moistening 1974 tightrope walk between their summits by French high wire artist Philippe Petit.





At dawn on August 7th, the young Frenchman shifted his weight from the foot planted on the still-under-construction South Tower, and placed it on the other foot, on a cable he and his confederates had strung across the 200 feet to the North Tower above 1,350 feet of empty vertical space.
"This was probably the end of my life," he remembers thinking, "and yet something I could not resist."

The film won 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
He never just "walked" on a wire. He lay down, knelt, juggled, ran. Every wire presented its own problems, and in rehearsing for the WTC, he built a wire the same distance in France. To simulate the winds, the movements of the buildings and the torsion of the wire, he had friends jiggle his wire, trying to toss him off. His balance was flawless. He explains how a wire can move: Up and down, sideways, laterally, and it also can sometimes twist.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/man-on-wire-2008 




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