My Inspiration for July 2021

Jul 31, 2021

3 min read

These sunny July days I very much enjoyed listening to my old favourite songs by Pearl Jam but also discovered some stuff by Chris Cornell, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains; especially the hauntingly beautiful live version of “Love, Hate, Love”. I am mildly obsessed with cactuses, both in paintings and in desert scenery, prairie dresses, 1970s Sarah Kay illustrations, vibrant, childlike, colorful paintings by Fauvists, Gauguin’s Tahiti-phase paintings, flower paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe… I got my hands on quite a few fascinating books this month (finally!), amongst them are the recently published and thought-provoking book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigal Shrier, Uncommon by Owen Hatherley; a book about the band Pulp, their aesthetic, lyrics and place as perpetual outsiders on the music scene, As I crossed a Bridge of Dreams; a wonderful novel written by a court lady in the 11th century Japan, The Bilingual Lover by Juan Marsé; both comical and sad at the same time, The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa; a novel which explores the lives of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother Flora Tristan; they both had in common the urge for freedom, and they both tried to break the chains of civilisations, each in their own way. I am also more than half-way through Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” which is very interesting and especially so in the age we are living in, here are two quotes I enjoyed:

“We are proud that we are not subject to any external authority, that we are free to express our thoughts and feelings, and we take it for granted that this freedom almost automatically guarantees our individuality. The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.”

“Freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism. This truth has been so forcefully formulated by John Dewey that I express the thought in his words: “The serious threat to our democracy,” he says, “is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions.”

“The days are long and weigh on me. I am suffocating.” (Albert Camus, from a letter featured in , c. 1940)