Saturday, August 24, 2019

مانسي العرزال - May Nasr / Zaki Nassif -



كلمات: اميل رفول
 ألحان: زكي ناصيف

مانسي العرزال طلات القمر بين الغيوم
ومانسي العرزال بسماتك
باقي علي وراقو اثر منك وصورة

بعدها الازهار تهمس للندى
وللطيب ياطول غيبات الحبيب
روحك دني وامال تحيينا
وهالروح منسينا ومانسي العرزال


بعدها الازهار تهمس للندى
وللطيب ياطول غيبات الحبيب
روحك دني وامال تحيينا
وهالروح منسينا ومانسي العرزال

ومانسي العرزال.....


Books above The Clouds



Project Name: ‘Books Above The Clouds’
Location: floor 52, shanghai tower, no.501 yincheng mid road, pudong, shanghai, china

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/wutopia-lab-bookstore-shanghai-08-24-2019/












The sun has gone out of your life - Tagore -

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, 
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
*
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.

― Rabindranath Tagore

Friday, August 23, 2019

قعدت الحلوة - Fairuz -



قعدت الحلوة تغزل بمغزالها

 وتراجع حساب العتيق ببالها
 عمر الهوى..حكاياتها.
.عهد المضى وكيف غنت للحلو موالها
 مش فايقة حكيت معه من ايمتي..
مش فايقة يمكن بأيام الشتي
 سألت اذا بحبها وقلا اسكتي
 وقرب ومدري شو ترك ع شالها
 وقديش يومها انقال واتألف حكي
 وقديش وعيت هالمخدة عالبكي
 شو تغار..شو تخبّي ولا كانت تشتكي
 وغير القمر ما كان داري بحالها
 واليوم حلمها زهّر وعاشوا سوا
 وبعدا ظنونها كرم بمهب الهوا
 وجروح ليش تعدّها جروح الهوا...
مازالها تركت بحقله غلالها
 راضية بفية عيونه راضية
 وناسية كل الجروح الماضية
 وبدموعها البيضا ع حبه ماضية
 حبه سماها وارضها..
وتلالها
 وقعدت الحلوة تغزل بمغزالها


كتبت اليك من عتبي - Fairuz -


كتبت اليك من عتبي
رسالة عاشق تعب
رسائله منازله يعمرها بلا سبب
يعود اليك عند الليل
حين تأوه القصب
يسائل كيف حال الدار
كيف مطارح اللعب
و يمسح دمعة سبقتك
رغم تمنع الهدب
أنا اعطيت هذا الليل
أسمائي وهاجر بي
جعلت نجومه كتبا
رسمتك نجمة الكتب
كتبت اليك من عتبي
رسالة عاشق تعب
رسائله منازله يعمرها بلا سبب


أنا يا عصفورة الشجن - Fairuz -



أنا يا عصفورة الشجن مثل عينيك بلا وطن
بي كما بالطفل تسرقه أول الليل يد الوسن
و اغتراب بي و بي فرح
 كارتحال البحر بالسفن
أنا لا أرض و لا سكن أنا عيناك هما سكني 
صوتها يبكي فأحمله بين زهر الصمت و الوهن
راجع من صوب أغنية يا زمانا ضاع في الزم
نن من حدود الأمس يا حلما زارني طيرا على غصن 

أي وهما أنت عشت به كنت في البال و لم تكن

حبني اليوم وانساني بكرا Fairuz


كفى يا قلب تشرد في ربوعو
 ومتل الطفل تسأل عن رجوعو
 شردوا عيونوا و محي صورة غرامك من ضلوعوا
 تركوا بكره بتتحرك شجونه
 و على هل الدار بيردوا ولوعوا
 مافي غيرنا بيروي حنينوا
 و مافي غيرنا بيمسح دموعوا 
*
حبني اليوم وانساني بكرا
 بحفظلك دوم في قلبي ذكرى
 شو نفع اللوم
 شو نفع الحسرة
 حبني اليوم وانساني بكرا

 حبك ضباب وغيوم بتدور
 كل الهضاب وكل الزهور
 أنا زهرة لقلبك
 يحييها قربك
 داويها بحبك
 بغيومك مرة

 حبني اليوم وانساني بكرا
 بحفظلك دوم في قلبي ذكرى
 شو نفع اللوم شو نفع الحسرة
 حبني اليوم وانساني بكرا


Sunday, August 18, 2019

Eating the Sun: the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human



Eating the Sun: the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human
- Courtesy : Maria Popova -

“When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.”

Sanders writes in the preface to this lyrical and luminous celebration of science and our consanguinity with the universe:


A sense of wonder can find you in many forms, sometimes loudly, sometimes as a whispering, sometimes even hiding inside other feelings — being in love, or unbalanced, or blue.


For me, it is looking at the night for so long that my eyes ache and I’m stuck seeing stars for hours afterwards, watching the way the ocean sways itself to sleep, or as the sky washes itself in colors for which I know I will never have the words — a world made from layers of rock and fossil and glittered imaginings that keeps tripping me up, demanding I pay attention to one leaf at a time, ensuring I can never pick up quite where I left off.


We only exist by chance, after all, in a universe governed by chaos and predicated on impermanence — Sanders writes:

When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.

Cry because we cannot even begin to understand how beautiful it is, cry because we are terribly flawed as a species, cry because it all seems so shockingly improbable that maybe our existence could be nothing but a dreamscape — celestial elephants in rooms without walls. But then? Surely, we can laugh.



Laugh because being riddled head-to-toe with human emotions while trying to come to terms with just how indisputably tiny we are in the grand scheme of things, makes absolutely everything and everyone seem quite ridiculous, entirely farcical. We have heads? Ridiculous! There are arguments about who is in charge here? Ridiculous! The universe is expanding? Ridiculous! We feel it necessary to keep secrets? Ridiculous.

Sanders shines a sidewise gleam on the illusion of the solid and separate self:

Depending on where you look, what you touch, you are changing all the time. The carbon inside you, accounting for about 18 percent of your being, could have existed in any number of creatures or natural disasters before finding you. That particular atom residing somewhere above your left eyebrow? It could well have been a smooth, riverbed pebble before deciding to call you home.

You see, you are not so soft after all; you are rock and wave and the peeling bark of trees, you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden after the rain. When you put your best foot forward, you are taking the north side of a mountain with you.


Sanders revisits the subject through the lens of the physics beneath the chemistry in a chapter on the structure and discovery of the atom. She writes:

Such a beautiful (and until recently invisible) idea, the importance and unavoidable nature of atoms, one that seems to put everyone and everything on a satisfyingly level playing field. Your good and bad decisions, your wingspan, your wholeness as a person — these are all possible because of your own 7 billion billion billion atoms, each one made up of (roughly speaking) a positive nucleus in the middle, and the negative electron cloud surrounding it — a cloud that sort of dances from side to side, alternately enchanting other atoms and pushing them away (the really complicated magic can be left to quantum mechanics). Without atoms, nothing would be here; not the book in your hands, not the pen that leaked into your pocket this morning, not those buildings that are enough to make you scared of heights, nothing. If it weren’t for atoms, there wouldn’t be mass, or molecules, or matter, or me, or you.



Sanders writes:

The idea of an unchanging “you” or “self” is inherently fraught with confusion and conflict, and if you consider the topic for too long it can begin to feel clammy, almost suspect. An apparent string running through all the previous versions of you — the one five minutes ago, a few hours ago, several years — the idea of “self” inevitably gets tangled up in things like the physical body and appearance, like memory. It’s clear that you cannot pin yourself down as any one particular “thing” but rather that you resemble a story line, an endless progression, variations on a theme, something that enables you to relate your present “self” to the past and future ones.

She adds:


We do seem to make sense of ourselves and the world as a part of a narrative — we think in terms of main characters, those we speak and interact with, and where the beginnings, the middles, and the endings are.

Sanders writes:

A lot of our time is spent trying to tie up loose ends, trying to shape disorder into something recognizably smooth, trying to escape the very limits that hold us close, happily ignoring rough edges and the inevitable. We separate ourselves out into past, present, and future, if only to show that we have changed, that we know better, that we have understood something inherent; if only to draw neat lines from start to finish without looking back.

The problem is that chaos is always only ever sitting just across the table, frequently glancing up from its newspaper, from its coffee cup filled with discolored and imploding stars. Because chaos too waits. Waits for you to notice it, for you to realize it’s the most dazzling thing you’ve ever seen, for all of your atoms to collectively shriek in belated recognition and stare, mouth open, at how exquisitely embedded it is in everything. Because we are not designed to be more orderly than anything else; seams have a tendency to come apart with time — you and the universe are the same in this way, which makes for a delicately overwhelming struggle.

So, then, if you can’t ever end things neatly, can’t ever put them back quite the way you found them, surely the alternative is to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility, to never rest from your rotation. To keep assembling stories between us, stories about how everything was everything, about how much we loved.





Friday, August 16, 2019

Départ -Nathalie Feld-

Départ
-Nathalie Feld-

Quand tu es parti, 
les larmes m’ont envahie, 
mais même les larmes n’ont pas rompu le charme 
de cette rencontre venant d’un autre monde. 

Quand tu es parti, 
j’ai suivi ton regard, 
pour me voir, 
un peu, 
avec tes yeux.

Il y a eu toutes ces heures, 
passées à cultiver mes peurs, 
mon souvent si noir passé 
que j’essaie de bien cacher, 
tous ces sentiments que j’ai ramassés 
et mis soigneusement à sécher 
entre les pages d’un livre d’images, 
pour les empêcher d’être libres 
et pouvoir me forcer à vivre.

Et maintenant que tu es parti, 
je souris et je vis. 

Impressionnant ce coup de vent, 
car sur ton passage tu as fait voler les pages 
et j’aime cet espace où plus rien n’est à sa place.


THE BLUEBIRD - Charles Bukowski -

THE BLUEBIRD
by Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?


Tuesday, August 13, 2019

A Piece of Our Heart - Rumi & Gibran -




This Longing
-Rumi-

I could not have known what love is
 if I had never felt this longing. 
Anything done to excess becomes boring, 
except this overflow that moves 
toward You.





Out of my Heart a Bird
- Gibran-


Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skywards.

Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.
At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.

of my heart a bird flew skywards. 

And it waxed larger as it flew. 
Yet it left not my heart.


Saturday, August 10, 2019

Some Camus ,what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying




'I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."

**

The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.
A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer “no” act as if they thought “yes.” As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think “yes” in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been so keen as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable.
In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead
One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth — yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide — this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an unjust — in other words, logical — thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
[…]
At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself.
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying… Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe — in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
[…]
A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume.
One day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins” — this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: “What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.” Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death — and I refuse suicide… Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.
[…]
But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.