From the heart of hummingbird to ours

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight
and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can
and down it comes in an instant,
felled by a woman's second glance,
a child's apple breath,
the shatter of glass in the road,
the words I have something to tell you,
a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die,
the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair,
the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen
where he is making pancakes for his children.

The last lines of "Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle.
A beautiful piece of writing begins with an invitation to consider the heart of a hummingbird, beats and pumps with facts, vigour, and ends inside a little left of our chest.

For full essay here.

Philosophers vs Artists

I'm reading a book on noted philosophers down the years of Western civilization, from Thales of Miletus to W.V.O. Quine, this is my observation:

The philosophers ask: What is there?
The artists ask: What is not there?

Wally Hermès Yacht

This is a blog that champions the beauty of the simple and everyday. But when came along a piece of man-made marvel as extraordinary and beautiful as this, the price tag and all its moral concerns aside, I can't help but be awed by its vision, innovation and architecture.

It's Wally Hermès Yacht, a co-project by the french luxury brand Hermès and Monaco based yacht maker Wally. That's why it's called WHY. And maybe that's also WHY you tell yourself to work the ass off for money!

www.why-yachts.com

Hermès × Tokujin Yoshioka

There's something quintessentially Zen about this.

More of Tokujin Yoshioka's works here: www.tokujin.com

The life of John and Mary

John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

(Atwood, in Lee, ed., 1985:370)

Is it a story? What is a story? These are the questions the author asked in The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (a very good book by the way). "This passage, in affluent societies, is what living 'happily ever after' means, or is supposed to mean..." "Imagine reading long, detailed descriptions of John's hobbies, or of their endless vacations together!... it would bored us to death."

The author aims to point out that a proper story, one that's able to engage us, requires two sets of things:

1) A close-up realization of Where, When and Who: the immediacy, the specific and minute-by-minute vividness, the very features that makes the story real.

2) A sense of danger, encounter, incident, disruption. (Why we aren't happy reading happiness is another case, and possibly a mystery.)

Isn't it the same with the story of our life? I wonder.

While we constantly devote our attention to the grand scale of things, like education, qualification, promotion, vacation, pension, shouldn't we at least spend a few minutes to savour the happenings, the intensiveness of everything that's going on around us? The air we're breathing in may smell sweetly different from yesterday because of the change of seasons. The glass of water you're drinking may be reflecting a marvel of light that once inspired Newton's optics and the Impressionists' palette. The beauty of nature, the good will of a stranger, the grin of your loved one that belongs only to you, every bit of our fickle reality could be easily and silently missed.

We all wish that life is mellow, flowery, nice and death-free, like in Disneyland. But of course reality bites. And even fairy tales have the dodgy part before the happy ending. While we're complaining to the Author, it may ease our pain by turning our thought to the possibility that without all the unexpected, the risk, the turbulence, the suffering, life could be equally unbearable on the extreme scale of another end – namely, boredom.

How audiobook can change my mood

I thought audiobook never worked, at least for me.
It demands relentless attention. Only if my mind wanders off for a second, the flow or the plot is lost.
The same can be said for reading, but you can easily pick up from where you left off.
It's not so much a nuisance to move your eye balls than your finger to reverse your iPhone.
And after all, I guess a native English speaker would find it difficult to grasp every single spoken word, let alone a Chinese like me.

I tried anyway, for the first time in my life, an audiobook of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, narrated by Samuel West.
No doubt it's as good as a book can be. It has all the usual elegance and wits of de Botton.
Lapses of attention did occur as expected, and when it happened, the narrating retreated to become almost like a background music.
That doesn't matter. And that's probably why I found it rather delightful.
To West's credit, by his lively narration, the continuous stream of tuneful British accent and the mere impression of absorbing knowledge and being so intellectual,
my mood was changed, before my life.

Sky covered with quilted blanket

I saw this the other day. The sky was covered with a quilted blanket.
It's closer and more overwhelming than it looks in the picture. ( iPhone camera has a wider angle lens than our human eyes.)
It's something between unreal and surreal. It gave me a strange sensation that could be what philosophers called the moment of sublime?

I don't know how to say. I paint.

You can't miss this sight, if you go from Sogo to Time Square. On the street of transit between two busiest spots in Causeway Bay. There used to be the famous Japanese department store Mitsukoshi of the '80s and '90s. Then it was torn down and gone with time.

A badly designed hoarding was erected, with mindless assembled stock photo faces looking up in anticipation of yet another shopping arcade. "Feel it", "Sense it", "Live it", it says, as empty as the space that has prolonged its presence.

The construction should have been completed by now. But the first concrete is yet to be seen. Among the hustle and bustle of shoppers, it became an existence of its own. And our existence is never in question, never mind others', as long as the shops are open. Except one morning in 2007, a 60-meter crane fell, killed two and injured five. A ripple soon faded into normality.

I pass the site twice everyday, to and off work. I don't know when it started haunting me. Was it the loveliness of the little window opened to let the tree be? The vast yellowness of the vinyl covering and how the flood light made radiance of folds on it? Or simply, I looked up and saw a kitten also looking up, among other printed faces. It was the time my cat was dying.

There's sadness, seems also hope. There's demolition, but also construction. It's night but there's light. A trace of nature surviving in the tides of culture. A person's remembrance of the dead trying to go beyond the hoarding – the veil.

Then words stopped. Language failed. To speak the unspeakable.

I don't know what to say. I sing.

BMW Unstoppable

I love doing ad when you're not just talking about the product, but something more universal, some human spirits that connect us. But how many clients today see that, and think it helps selling their brand?

And I really love Scottish accent.