sean

“What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “rather than the quality of experience.” But what if we don’t want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“There is a strong and fairly substantial theory in India as elsewhere that the gypsies of Europe originated in tribes driven out by Indian population displacements of the remote past.”
― Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

“Once in a while, she said, the patients put on a theatrical show here, and beneath the stage a magnificent grand piano awaited the next production or display of the musical talents of an inmate. I congratulated her on this impressive piece of furniture and she smiled with pleasure. A moment later she was called away, and idly lifting the lid over the keyboard I was faced with the fact that the piano possessed no keys. It was a discovery which at that moment seemed of extreme symbolical significance.”
― Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

“I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry