Ben Wilson
Power to the People
‘New, new, new,’ Tony Blair marvelled early in his premiership; ‘everything is new.’ He personified a willing amnesia that is so much part of our age. The temptation to dwell in the present, with its bewildering newness and illusion of liberation, outweighs an interest in history as a vital part of our political life. This is an age ruled by restricted definitions of what is relevant. The decline of history and the languishing state of our democratic institutions and liberty are not unrelated.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3