Litzlberg on the Attersee (c. 1910-1912) by Gustav Klimt:
Houses at Unterach am Attensee (1916) by Gustav Klimt:
Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer (1912) by Gustav Klimt:
Farm Garden with Sunflowers (1907) by Gustav Klimt:
Watched the first episode of Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-part documentary series Civilisation (1969). Eager for more…
Listening to Joan Shelley’s self-titled LP (2017) at the recommendation of a friend. I don’t recall the last time I gave such undivided attention to an entire album.
Finished reading: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch 📚
One of those books where seemingly every paragraph is bursting with ideas. A good word for the book would be generative. So many of Lasch’s insights spurred my mind to go in all different directions. It is astounding that the book was published in 1979 (!!!) and speaks with as much insight to our current culture as anything written today. The Culture of Narcissism is now my favorite example of what I argued for here.
The best defenses against the terrors of existences are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs…. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of “creative, meaningful work” are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of “true romance” puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.
More than anything else, it is this coexistence of hyper-rationality and a widespread revolt against rationality that justifies the characterization of our twentieth-century way of life as a culture of narcissism. These contradictory sensibilities have a common source. Both take root in the feelings of homelessness and displacement that afflict so many men and women today, in their heightened vulnerability to pain and deprivation, and in the contradiction between the promise that they can “have it all” and the reality of their limitations.