Life the Horizontal Fall

The city of whipsers

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:00 -0700

in the country of walls
there lived people with muffled shouts
children with no ears or tongues
and those vanished like passing clouds

The City of Whispers is an average little town in the Country of Walls. Its residents speak only in whispers - not because their voices are low, nor have they sensitive ears, but - because the country is famous for its portable InvisibleWalls®, which is a recent invention, an equipment all citizens are required to carry wherever they go.

Wearing the InvisibleWalls® as a cloak, the volume of one’s voice is significantly diminished, to a soft murmur. One can hardly hear oneself, let alone the others. Among all the softly spoken voices it is nearly impossible to tell apart gossips, rumors, truth or lies.

Many of those who once had tried to rid themselves from these suffocating barriers had disappeared, others had been silenced one way or another.

And the rest, as you know, live happily ever after™.

Setting off

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:55 -0700

走累了，讓背包也歇歇腳。

Hey, our color matches!

Hong Kong in my memory

Fri, 15 May 2009 18:53 -0700

The sense of love is transient.
The sense of being in love is often just being in love with that moment.

We tend to project the evasive image of this fleeting sensation onto something more concrete, something that we believe to be more constant and abiding, like a place, an object, or a person... but often we are fooled.

An enduring love consists of many of such moments, each of which a resonating echo of another, together they are timeless. They are the perpetual memory against oblivion.

Jesusita

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:36 -0700

05/06/2009 14:58:55

As we were watching the smoke swarming towards us, worrying, we couldn't helping admiring its stunning beauty.
In the events of grand magnitude, one can disregard many things once considered important.

A thousand pieces

Wed, 06 May 2009 01:45 -0700

Ghostly wind of truth
shattered the glass of tomorrow.

It never felt so ephemeral.

Nicola's simple delight, and so was mine

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:28 -0700

Were we looking at the same flower?
Peut-être. The reincarnation of the same bud.

Only such pleasures as are prudent and modest

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:00 -0700

Back to work now.
Back to life and nature and the spring and the leisure.

In everyday language, the term "hedonism" denotes an amoral tendency to a life of sensuality, if not of outright vice. This is inaccurate, of course: Epicurus, the first great theoretician of pleasure, had a highly skeptical understanding of the happy life: pleasure is the absence of suffering. Suffering, then, is the fundamental notion of hedonism: one is happy to the degree that one can avoid suffering, and since pleasures often bring more unhappiness than happiness, Epicurus advises only such pleasures as are prudent and modest. Epicurean wisdom has a melancholy backdrop: flung into the world's misery, man sees that the only clear and reliable value is the pleasure, however paltry, that he can feel for himself: a gulp of cool water, a look at the sky (at God's windows), a caress.

- Milan Kundera, Slowness, p.7-8

Dreams again

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:06 -0700

In the dreams my imaginations were in full bloom, like the wild grass flourished after rain.

2009 a bit better

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:05 -0700

We had two weeks off at the end of 2008. Thanks to the bad economy, most companies closed shop and the entire nation had a most relaxed holiday season ever, before slumping deeper into depression. I spent half of my days sleeping, the other half busy in doing nothings.

2008 looked bleak

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:52 -0700

The last day of 2008 was a bad day, so I slept it through. With a little help from the three-year-old giant joint Justin left in my fridge, my last ten hours of the year was erased by some flamboyant dream interludes. Also spent most of the beginning of 2009 drowsing in and out of reality. Sleep is a painkiller.