A Quote by Colm Toibin
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
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I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?
It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.
Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.
As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.
There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.
When there's more lows than highs and I'm not just talking financially, it may be time to see what else is out there for you. Even at this point, I am open to the possibility that there may be another chapter on the horizon and I trust that I'll know in my heart when it's time to close the chapter on this one. I am much more than just an actor. It is what I do now and I try not to get boxed in by the belief that that is all I have to offer the world as my work.
There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.
What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.
Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.
My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.
...being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.... What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.
It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
The tone of good web writing grows out of email. It's more direct, personal, colloquial, urgent, witty, efficient. It doesn't waste your time. It reflects that engagement, responsiveness, and haste of web surfers, as opposed to the more general passivity of print readers.
There's always another level up. There's always another ascension. More grace, more light, more generosity, more compassion, more to shed, more to grow.
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