Merry hearts, pleasant faces, light walks,
Birds tweeting, dogs frolicking, people chatting;
The sun’s risen, and the day’s at the morning.
The weekend’s on Friday, and the joy begins.
Tag: literature
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‘Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times’ by Thomas Waters – review
Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas WatersMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Witchcraft as popular belief system may sound anachronistic, if not extinct, in our age of the Internet, Satellite TVs, and planned colonization of the Moon, in the same way, that people in Renaissance regarded the Medieval times culturally backward and religiously superstitious. Yet, it has survived the leaps of time and waves of persecution, withstanding like a flickering candlelight in hours of stormy dark nights and remains in modern landscapes of buildings, cars, airplanes, and people with mobile phones on their hands.
Thomas Waters in his Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times tells us how this ancient belief system of faith-based healing at its lightest and of maleficent bewitching at its darkest has kept its vitality from the rural areas of provinces to the bustling streets of cities in Great Britain throughout the centuries based on his extensive research of historical documents and scholarly analysis on the uncanny but very real phenomena that grips your attention on every page of this fascinating book.
If you are keen on historical facts and anthropological evidence of human nature in relation to the ancient esoteric knowledge that looks so appealing and tempting, this is an excellent book.
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Classy and Fabulous
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated,” said fashionable Oscar Wilde. Sure, they say beauty is only a skin-deep, but what eyes can see determines what the mind judges. Jane Austen also corroborated being a sensibly fashionable and culturally sophisticated woman thus: “Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former.”
Photo taken with Focos
Photo taken with Focos
Photo taken with Focos
Photo taken with FocosIn this time of social media, propriety and civility seem no longer requisite for ladyship because the impersonality of urbanity and the mingling of ranks in streets have licensed shabbiness and incivility in the facade of casualness and convenience. However, one thing is certain that as our human nature has not been changed since the time immemorial, our appreciation of aestheticism remains in every culture. So much so that even someone like Albert Einstein who looked care less about his appearance said, “Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots”
Hence, the beautiful ladies wallowed themselves in classical elegance, strolling the elegant arcades of Biltmore Tower, where they work as legal assistants. They are fashionistas in their own rights whose ingeniously elegant style endures and emanates from their minds and characters, which are even more fabulous. For they dwell on the beauty of life and think that a thing of beauty is a joy of life.
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Simple delights
Olga Boznańska (1865–1940), Interior of the Artist’s Studio in Krakow (1906) I’d rather have good books than designer bags;
A few good readers than a legion of followers;
and a faithful true lover than a band of admirers.
For a bloom of roses satisfies me more than a rope of rubies.
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Dialogue on Five Ages of Man
Horatio (L) and Larry (R) Larry: I wonder what age we are currently in.
Horatio: How do you mean? You sound like a peripatetic thinker like Aristotle.
Larry: I mean the age according to Hesiod, the father of western narrative history. The name may sound Greek to you, my dear friend.
Horatio: So, you think I am a philistine because of my patently plebian appearance and mercantile profession? I take false shadows for true substances, buddy. I have read about Five Ages of Man according to Hesiod and can tell you that we are in Iron age to which Hesiod himself also belonged. In this age, we human beings must toil away for livelihood, get old quickly, are besotted by troubles and more troubles under constant stress and pressure. In fact, it’s not our mortals’ faults but those Olympians who continued a cycle of creation and destruction of a human race on their whims and caprice in epicycle. In the first place, Zeus and his ilk drove away the benevolent race of the golden age after Titanomarchy, a ten year war against Titans, then began a recycle of the races for the silver, bronze, heroic and iron afterwards because they did not like what they saw in the races on the grounds of morality and maturity. It’s like the Olympians regarded us humans as a sort of puppets or marionettes. Or they are playing chess of our destiny with our beings used as pieces to be moved on a chess board. Yes, we live in the iron age, but I reject the idea that we are all living in a doomed scenario because we human beings have amazing intelligence with its general multipurpose learning strategies to triumph against the outrageous Olympian pandemonium. So, my friend, fear not. Boldness be our friends. For as Shakespeare encourages us that “true hope is swift, and files with swallow’s wings.”
Larry: My dear friend, Horatio. Thank you for your sagacious thinking and brilliant advice on humanity. And let’s just say that for all what’s worth, mankind has resilience to spring back from the ashes of destruction with its fortitude and instinct for survival. It’s our human nature. And let us also remind ourselves of the dictum of Hemingway: “Man can be destroyed but not be conquered.”
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High Moon
This lunar beauty is full and fast and proudWith the heart that changes where a ghost is
Heard but not seen, is seen and but not heard.
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