Affluenza and other strange ailments
24/06/2004 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIzzie has been snooping in her friendses pages and found some interesting Aci snippets.
Like Aci, Iz is also a fan of the most fascinating and erudite Alain De Boiton who has the amazing ability to explain complicated and convoluted ideas to simple creatures such as the Iz. But unlike Aci, Iz has not read the books and has had to make do with interesting interviews on the radio that some nice house elves have kindly transcribed. (Do people really do that sort of work or have they invented a computer to do such tedious stuff? Iz has had on occasion to transcribe stuff and it is an absolute nightmare. You get such sore fingers from constantly pressing the rewind button)
Keeping up with the Dursleys
Iz particularly enjoyed this quote
"One of the things that death can do is refocus our priorities – make us usefully and productively selfish and self-centred. If, for example, you’re worried about having too many social engagements, a very quick way of emptying your diary is to reflect on who among your broad and rich social circle would make it to your hospital bed if you were diagnosed with cancer, and similarly in medieval times, there was a long tradition of putting a skull on your sideboard, your library shelves, so that as you were going about the business of the day, you would occasionally catch sight of this skull staring at you. The point wasn’t to make you give up on everything; it was precisely to make you focus on some things rather than others.
Another quite useful thing to do is not just to think about your death, but rather also to think of the death of other people, particularly other people who, at the moment, make you quite status anxious. It’s quite nice to think that they too will be dead quite soon, and that all of us are going to end up as that most democratic, most genuinely egalitarian of substances – dust. "
It reminds Iz of the saying "The problem with equality is that we only want it with our superiors"
Like Aci, Iz is also a fan of the most fascinating and erudite Alain De Boiton who has the amazing ability to explain complicated and convoluted ideas to simple creatures such as the Iz. But unlike Aci, Iz has not read the books and has had to make do with interesting interviews on the radio that some nice house elves have kindly transcribed. (Do people really do that sort of work or have they invented a computer to do such tedious stuff? Iz has had on occasion to transcribe stuff and it is an absolute nightmare. You get such sore fingers from constantly pressing the rewind button)
Keeping up with the Dursleys
Iz particularly enjoyed this quote
"One of the things that death can do is refocus our priorities – make us usefully and productively selfish and self-centred. If, for example, you’re worried about having too many social engagements, a very quick way of emptying your diary is to reflect on who among your broad and rich social circle would make it to your hospital bed if you were diagnosed with cancer, and similarly in medieval times, there was a long tradition of putting a skull on your sideboard, your library shelves, so that as you were going about the business of the day, you would occasionally catch sight of this skull staring at you. The point wasn’t to make you give up on everything; it was precisely to make you focus on some things rather than others.
Another quite useful thing to do is not just to think about your death, but rather also to think of the death of other people, particularly other people who, at the moment, make you quite status anxious. It’s quite nice to think that they too will be dead quite soon, and that all of us are going to end up as that most democratic, most genuinely egalitarian of substances – dust. "
It reminds Iz of the saying "The problem with equality is that we only want it with our superiors"
