Books &Literature Entropy | 04 Aug 2008
In this age of mass media, mass movement, and globalization it is likely that we will confront different cultures and different races as we go about our daily business. But Turkey, which straddles the intersection of East and West, has always had to deal with the problems and pleasures of diversity. The best-selling Turkish novelist [...]
Poetry &Sprituality Entropy | 20 Feb 2008
Excerpts from Octavio Paz‘ speech at the Nobel Banquet, December- 1990 At the close of this century we have discovered that we are part of a vast system (or network of systems) ranging from plants and animals to cells, molecules, atoms and stars. We are a link in “the great chain of being”, as the [...]
Meditation &Poetry Entropy | 09 Jan 2008
Strong relativism and openness are well known to be important dimensions in the temporal sphere at the basis of Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry. The way in which she links the past with the present, the present with what is to come and the event/experience of a moment with the weightless dimension of eternity is what gives [...]
Books &Life &Literature Entropy | 15 Dec 2007
Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the ‘inanities’ of the internet It seems relatively lengthy to read on screen, however [...]
Literature &Sufi Insight Entropy | 02 Nov 2007
The following is a parable from ‘Echoes of an Autobiography’ by the Nobel Laureate Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih said: I stood before the holy tomb as I asked God for health and long life. An old beggar with tattered clothes approached me. “Do you really want a long life?” he asked me. [...]
Meditation &Poetry Entropy | 22 Oct 2007
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no nonbeing can hold. – Wislawa Szymborska Polish Poet (Born July 1923)/Nobel Literature Prize 1996 Excerpt from her Nobel Lecture December 1996 Poets, [...]