Tag: Aldous Huxley

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Q: You’d been disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years. What was the depression about?

SP: or a long time I gauged the value that a film would have on a good script, a good cast, a good director and a subject that I would want to go see a movie about. Those things were enough for a while. You get older, and you get more aware of the sacrifices. It’s about time, which we don’t get more of. It’s not enough to work with people you respect and like. You want the same thing you find in family. You want to be with people you love, and it wasn’t since Gus Van Sant’s movie “Milk” that I’d had that feeling. So I kept taking these jobs that I thought were good jobs about good subjects with good directors and I was missing my family, my dog, and I said, What the [expletive] am I doing here? I felt like, maybe I’m done with all this. […]

Q: We talked about how in the recent past you struggled with motivation about acting, and also how you can feel a lot of anger at the world. So what gets you up in the morning these days?

SP: I’m not averse to feeling extremely frustrated with the world. “The world”: We know what we’re saying, I think; I don’t want to be grandiose, or I don’t know how not to be. But I don’t even know if I would call what Russia and Putin are up to right now something that I engage in a lot of rage about. I don’t need rage to get me to a clarity of knowing how evil and obscene it is. The frustration is with those who are not willing to be sober enough to recognize our sacred duty to support the defense of Ukraine. But I don’t even call that anger so much. [Penn points to one eye] I wake up every day with this eye clear about the threat to the environment, the anguish people are going through, attempts to figure out how I can be of any value-added. [Penn points to his other eye] And this one is driving me from the time I wake up, and all I see is that this is still a magic trick of a beautiful cosmos and I am gonna [expletive] enjoy it every day — and I do. Sorry to those who would have me do otherwise, but I am feeling great.

— Sean Penn, from Interview by David Marchese: Sean Penn Let Himself Get Away With Things for 15 Years. Not Anymore.” (NY Times, Sept 27, 2025)

Notes:

  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

First rule of living is to live.

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Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

— James Rebanks, from the Prelude of “The Place of Tides” (Mariner Books, June 24, 2025)

Notes:

  • Loved the book. Highly recommended.
  • Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
  • Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn21 Comments

Ours is a dark and chaotic world. We are all in need of lights to follow. On that island I felt I had met someone who had made a life on her own terms. I was increasingly sure that I, on the other hand, had not… And, as the years passed, I began to feel unmoored, like a piece of timber drifting on the current. The feeling grew. I worked long hours trying to succeed in a modern world I didn’t like very much. I’d doubled my salary, and then doubled it again, but rarely felt any satisfaction or happiness… I began to lose faith in the certainties that had sustained me. I was growing less sure, and more confused. My work took me to places where the world was breaking; places that had, until now, survived. I saw children lying under sheets of tin by roadsides, and hospitals in slums plagued with rats and filth. Despair began to follow me home. Birds like lapwings and curlews were vanishing from the skies above our farm. I could no longer see the point in trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken. I had once had endless reserves of hope and self-belief, but they were beginning to run out. Some nights I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie anxiously staring at the ceiling. Part of me just wanted to escape. To run away and hide…

I couldn’t stop thinking about the old woman on the rocks. There was something still alive in her that had died in me. I had seen it in her eyes. I needed to go back and work out what it was – the urge was overwhelming. It was like someone had shown me a few lines of a truly great book and then closed the covers tight shut. I had no idea how I might ever get back there…

Seven years passed. Then, one day, I wrote Anna a letter, and sent it to her via the guide who had taken me. I asked if she was still going out to work on the island and whether she might let me visit her, learn about her work, and maybe write about her. I would keep quiet, work to earn my keep, and try to stay out of the way.

— James Rebanks, from the Prelude of “The Place of Tides” (Mariner Books, June 24, 2025)

Notes:

  • Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
  • Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn14 Comments

These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.

— Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren. (W. W. Norton & Company, September 19, 2023) (

Notes:

  • DK Photo 5:05 am Wednesday, June 25 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk here.
  • Thank you Make Believe Boutique for the Enright passage.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn16 Comments

Happiness is getting up and going downstairs in the morning, opening all the doors and petting the dogs, walking around the garden and along the wooden pier in the cool morning air and listening to the crows and the chirping of all the other birds as you wait for the water for your tea to boil in the kitchen.

— Orhan Pamuk, “Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022.” Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Knopf, November 26, 2024)

Notes:

  • Amazon: “For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him.“
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.