明天, 今天, 昨天（ghostneuron）

I found some interesting book by chance in Countway Library:

A Morning’s Work By Stanley B. Burns

Sexuality By Sander L. Gilman 

The Story of Civilization By Will and Ariel Durant 

Memories, Dreams, Reflections By Carl Gustav Jung, Aniela Jaffé, Clara Winston

The Writer and Psychoanalysis By Edmund Bergler

08年真是多事之秋，民主，民权，民族，民生问题把中国炒得红透了。。。我是自由主义者，认为一切政治都是无聊的消耗斗争, 不过就是有人喜欢斗, 所谓" 与人斗,其乐无穷" 吗. 要追溯历史的话, 我们现在地球上的人类都是几百万年前一个东非女人的后代, 像巴比塔的故事,圣经的故事里讲的一样, 因为羊群,因为女人,利益之争主导了人类社会的历史, 就像最近的新片’10000 BC’ 以及所有历史战争片所描述的, 从兄弟相残, 父子相残开始, 家族之争到国家之战….直到今天,  民族冲突, 宗教冲突, 种族清洗,  恐怖主义 仍然弥漫泛滥着,主宰着人类的未来…一手拿剑,一手拿橄榄枝,人类在这种紧张中进化着, 现在的西藏问题就是最新的例证. 看到两篇西方人关于西藏的著作, 是知识分子的研究专著,看起来很客观, 有时间仔细读一下: "The Shadow of Dalai Lama" and "The Tibet Myth"

"It’s better to be thought of as a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

___words of today 

sounds like "不耻下问“ 

Rilke is a man knowing love and wanted to change as a man:

"For centuries now, women have undertaken the entire task of love; they have always played the whole dialogue, both parts. For man has only echoed them, and badly. And has made the learning difficult with his inattention, with his neglect, with his jealousy, which is also a form of neglect. And they have nevertheless persevered day and night, and have grown in love and misery. And from among them, under the stress of endless need, have gone forth those valiant lovers, who, while they called him, rose above their man; who grew beyond him when he did not return, like Gaspara Stampa or like the Portuguese nun, who never desisted until their torture was transmuted into an austere, icy splendour which nothing could confine. We know about one and another because of letters, which as by a miracle have been preserved, or books of poems written in accusation or lament, or portraits in some gallery that look at us through a longing to weep which
the painter caught because he knew not what it was. But there have been innumerably many more: Those who burned their letters, and others who had no strength left to write them. Aged women, grown hard, but with a kernel of delight which they kept hidden. Uncouth, powerful women, who, made strong through exhaustion, let themselves grow gradually like their husbands, and who were yet entirely different in their inmost being, there where their love had laboured in the dark. Child-bearing women who never wanted to conceive, and who, when they finally died after their eighth child, had the gestures and the lightness of young girls looking forward to love. And those women who remained with their bullies and drunkards because they had found the means, in themselves, to withdraw far from them as they could nowhere else; and this they could not conceal, when they came among people, but were radiant as though they moved always with the blessed. Who can say how many they were, or who they were ? It is as if they had destroyed beforehand the words in which they might be described.

BUT now that so much is being changed, is it not time that we should change? Could we not try to develop ourselves a little, slowly and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labour of love? We have been spared all its hardship, and so it has slipped in among our distractions, as into a child’s drawer of toys sometimes a piece of real lace falls and pleases him and pleases him no longer and finally lies there among torn and dismembered things, worse than any of them. We have been spoiled by easy enjoyment, like all dilettanti, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes, what if we began from the beginning to learn the work of love which has always been done for us ? What if we were to go and become neophytes, now that so much is changing?"

 __from Rilke <The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge>

今天赶着去游泳，正赶上水球队训练，占了大半个池子，剩下的几个泳道里已经积满了人，而且是每个泳道两个人；我等了十分钟，终于走掉了。。。最近试验比较紧凑，有些时间就赶着看书，计划中的每月一本，两本都开了头，齐头并进：  "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin, and "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke, one is scientist, one is poet……hope to finish both before this month end…

尼采说，“人們必須在心中懷著混亂，為了能夠創造一個舞動的新星 “。。。让我的心更混乱些吧！

尼采还说，“人是一根繫在動物和超人之間的繩子。也就是深淵上方的繩索。走過去危險，停在中途也危險，顫抖也危險，停住也危險“。。。人是绳子，谁在上面走呢？是人自己走在自己的心里？退回去安全啊！做动物吧！

V let me read this movie analysis by a doctor, Diagnosing The English Patient: schizoid fantasies of being skinless and of being buried alive. It’s quite interesting, which ignite my interest to see all the psychos behind movies and novels. And this blog seems tell us something in a person like Almásy. And someone has already make a list for me.  So what’s the psycho behind Lust, Caution, also a movie of debating.

British writer Doris Lessing won Nobel Prize on literature this year. cited from the biography of the writer:

"Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with The Grass is Singing (1950), which examines the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts."

"The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20^th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character’s mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience."

"In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays."

Granny Lessing is really a surfer in the human world, she experienced colonialism, communism, rasism, capitalism, and globlization, and she is in science fiction lands, what a modern girl, woman and artist…..But there are only one theme in center, Men-women relationship…….I hope to do some reading later.

"We know that our work is rightly both an instrument and an end. A great discovery is a thing of beauty; and our faith- our binding quiet faith- is that knowledge is good….So it is with us as scientists, so it is with us as men. We are at once instrument and end, discoveries and teachers, actors and observers."   __Robert Oppenheimer in his Reith Lecture " Science and Common Understanding." 1953

I’ve just finished reading the book No Man Alone- A Neurosurgeon’s Life by Wilder Penfield, a famous American neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, who once worked with many big guys of neuroscience in the 20th century like Sherrington, Cushing, and Cajal. He himself is the first to discover oligodendrocytes in the brain, an expert on brain surgery, and he is also a good leader to build a neurological institute in Montreal. He was most active during the 1930’s as a young man in his thirties, both on medicine and research. His good and simple writing made it a popular autobiography for medical students. At least in the book I was reading, there are many pen underlines. I admire this type of people whose life is like a legend…most important I find strength from the book to carry on my own life, as a scientist, as a doctor and as a man……

读报闻余英时获2006年美国国会图书馆Kluge人文与社会科学奖,知此人为通晓国学,汉学,中国学的学者,著作有 《历史与思想》《中国思想传统的现代诠释》《方以智晚节考》《论戴震与章学诚》《红楼梦的两个世界》《中国近代思想史上的胡适》《陈寅恪晚年诗文释证—兼论他的学术精神与晚年心境》《犹记风吹水上鳞—钱穆与现代中国学术》《朱熹的历史世界—宋代士大夫政治文化的研究》《宋明理学与政治文化》