I worked in the film industry for 27 years and now I cannot watch a movie. My favorite movie is a movie I cannot watch. Movies now seem too literal, too linear, too authoritarian in their plot lines. It's not that time is an arrow (plots can still

Better to be a broken piece of jade than an intact piece of pottery. 宁为玉碎，不为瓦全 Is it better to restore once-destroyed ruins to their former glory or leave them as a reminder of what happened? The Chinese proverb above is about integrity: how do we respect the past? Or

The Tauentzienstrasse beyond was like an avenue of shattered monuments. Through wide gaps between formless mounds of rubble, you got views over the great central desert of destruction, and saw the Sieges Saeule rising forlornly from the treeless, snow-covered plain of the Tiergarten, which was dotted with bizarre remnants of

Marco Polo enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one

What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores. A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. John Buchan Greenmantle (1916) For

Childe Harold: "In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone – but Beauty still is here." Lord Byron's Childe Harold'

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. Y.B. Yeats Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so

"And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast

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Are you a Flat Thinker or a Linear Thinker? Is this a world of incurious technophiles who can't read a book or a newspaper article, let alone pick their way through this website? Is this website way too hard to read anyway? Yes I think it has to