Kelvin Wright

To practice means that you do something you can do in order to do something that you can't. For example, if I decided I wanted to run a marathon, I would know that despite my best intentions I can't run 42 kilometers but I can run, if I was determined, maybe 1 km. So I would practice.

Human beings bond in a number of ways. We have all manner of instinctual drives inherited from our evolutionary past; we have needs (for intimacy, pleasure, friendship, affirmation and a thousand more besides) which we depend on other people to fulfill. We have hidden parts of ourselves which we project on others so that we can, in relationship with those others, work  out our inner conflicts by proxy. We have our inner cravings for power or esteem or security which we imagine that others can satisfy for us. 

There is a scene in The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King in which Peter Jackson improves on Tolkien....

Last week was the anniversary of the trial of Galileo, and time for a predictable plethora of commentary all over the place along the good-scientist/bad-prelates line. I have myself written about this in the past, here and here, and don't really want to do it again, but the pseudoargument sat jarringly with other happenings in my world. Particularly, I have been thinking about illusions. About lying, falsehood, deception, prevarications, elaboration of the truth, strategic silences and all the other devices behind which we hide from the light.