At this hour in Kyoto. Good Luck.

To Mz.

HONSHI TSU
“Despite passing through various stages of development, the essence (honshi-tsu) of Kendo has remained constant: one person faces another, ready with the shinai, mind meets mind, and the opponents strike. By training one's spirit and performing keiko correctly, honestly, and full of vigor, an ennobling of human nature takes place. This may initially appear paradoxical, for how can human nature be enno­bled by the act of looking for an opponent's unguarded moment and execut­ing a strike?
To appreciate this it should be realized that Kendo today is practiced in an environment removed from the everyday world. The act of attacking and par­rying is carried out with the implicit understanding that no one actually intends to kill or wound an opponent. Rather, in engaging in such an act, opponents both compete and cooperate with one another. Always remember to respect your opponent and to recognize his or her human nature, while at the same time resisting with all your might. In this way, each can ennoble the human nature of the other. Competition rules exist precisely to help maintain this vital balance. In addition, while winning a match is important in Kendo, it is equally important to conquer yourself in the difficult situation in which you are placed. In other words, it is essential when learning Kendo to form a spirit of self-denial, which will lead to an ennobling of the self”.

Hiroshi Ozawa - Kendo

PELA NOITE DENTRO - DON QUIXOTE

Quatros momentos de glória: Nureyev, Simkin, Uvarov, Baryshnikov

Apesar da interpretação genial de Nureyev, da frescura de Simkin e da exactidão de Uvarov, o meu voto, quase sempre, para Barishnikov, aqui também antecedida de um belo Corsário.

Nureyev

Simkin

Uvarov

Baryshnikov

Roma Nocturna

"Roma" - Fellini

SERENAMENTE, PELA NOITE DENTRO

Mon enfant, ma soeur,

Songe a la douceur

D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!

Aimer à loisir,

Aimer et mourir

Au pays qui te ressemble!

Les soleils mouillés

De ces ciels brouillés

Pour mon esprit ont les charmes

Si mysterieux

De tes traîtres yeux,

Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

Des meubles luisants,

Polis par les ans,

Decoreraient notre chambre;

Les plus rares fleurs

Mêlant leurs odeurs

Aux vagues senteurs de 1'ambre,

Les riches plafonds,

Les miroirs profonds,

La splendeur orientale,

Tout y parlerait
A l'âme en secret

Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux

Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;

C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir

Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,

Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort

Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

Baudelaire - L'Invitation au Voyage

Em fundo - Noel Coward - Matelot

Agradabilíssima surpresa de blogosfera melómana - Lira de Terpsichore

Pela Noite Dentro - Mozart para mim, que hoje bem mereço

Ildebrando d'Arcangelo
Le Nozze di Figaro "Se Vuol Ballare" - Salzburg 2006

ENFIM, A CAMINHO

E EU HOJE ACABEI O DIA ASSIM

TROUVAILLE MIAU - Le chat de la voisine

TROUVAILLE BOUM - A Noite Parisiense d'O Jansenista?

The man who took a PhD in Happiness Science
(Paul Johnson “The Spectator” 23.6.2007)

Lady Diana Cooper used to relate that, at a dinner she gave in the British embassy in Paris, not long after the war, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to now her husband had left office. To the consternation of the table she replied, ‘A penis.’ Whereupon the General spoke: ‘No, my dear, you are mispronouncing the word. You mean “appiness”.’ Yes: but what did the lady really mean? What does anyone mean by happiness? It is the most subjective of all emotional states. As Kant said in his Ethics, ‘Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.’ Nevertheless, public-spirited people, wishing to ‘do good’, are always subjecting it to rational analysis, so as to devise government policies to maximise it. As long ago as 1725 the Scotch philosopher Francis Hutcheson coined the maxim ‘That action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.’ The idea was taken over, without acknowledgment, by Jeremy Bentham, as the ‘sacred truth’ of his new political theory, utilitarianism: ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’ He defined happiness, essentially, as the experience of pleasure accompanied by the absence of pain. His approach was crudely quantitative and unsubtle: it was left to John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism to differentiate between pleasure and happiness. Nonetheless, Bentham was not a fool. He argued that the best way in practice to promote happiness was to synthesise utilitarianism with the free-market system advocated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, to produce an adumbration of the welfare state, with guaranteed employment, free education and sickness benefits. […] We do not have to go as far as Shaw, who wrote in Man and Superman that ‘a lifetime of happiness’ would be ‘hell on earth’. But it’s clear to some of us anyway that the pursuit of happiness is unlikely to get you there. When I was an editor, one of my staff told me he wanted to resign as ‘I’m not very happy.’ ‘Happy?’ I roared. ‘You are not here to be happy. You are here to do your duty.’ He scuttled off, terrified, but resigned all the same. I suppose the attempt to perform one’s duties, conscientiously and warmly, is an essential step towards achieving peace of mind, which, in my experience, is the best definition of happiness. Certainly the spiritual dimension cannot be left out. St Thomas Aquinas thought that ‘the very seeing of God’, defined by him as ‘an act of the intellect’, was ‘substantially and basically our happiness’. And that is the message of St John of the Cross’s wonderful little book The Dark Night of the Soul, which is probably a better guide than a PhD in Happiness Science. For it’s all very well sitting for degrees in the subject, but what if you fail? Then you realise, in the words of old Dr Whately, the famous Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, ‘Happiness is no laughing matter.’ Indeed no. As I wander down the muddle-headed path of life, I tend to agree with Evelyn Waugh’s last sentence in his book Labels, written in misery when his first marriage collapsed in humiliation: ‘Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.’

Mozart, Losey, Raimondi

Joseph Losey "Don Giovanni" (1979)

PELA NOITE DENTRO - LOSEYANA

O Jansenista recorda Mr. Klein, uma das tão fantásticas quanto esquecidas obras de Joseph Losey.
Três jóias: Mr. Klein, The Servant e a soberba versão cinematográfica de Don Giovanni -- Delon e Jeanne Moreau na primeira, Bogarde e James Fox na segunda, Ruggero Raimondi na terceira -- com o refinamento estético do décor parisiense e londrino ou da solução palladiana na sempre dificílima mise en scène da obra-prima de Mozart.

Não conheço outro que tão próximo chegasse à similitude de Luchino Visconti naquilo que um dia Henry Bacon definiu na biografia do milanês como "Explorations of Beauty and Decay".

À TOUTE VITESSE

Regressado donde Combustões me pôs.

E lá vou eu!

Como é agora moda dizer-se, "vou para as minas"; a duas horas e meia de voo já se está longe desta nauseante terra da presidência...

Vénias à esquerda e à direita, muitos cumprimentos e até lá mais para o Verão!

Em tempo:

Otium, otium, como bem explica RCS

NO CALDEIRO DE PERO BOTELHO

Trindade infernal e um extra de brinde?

SINICA - I

Spenciana

Dando o desconto à "infalibilidade" (de que só conheço a auto-assumida do prognata, e a dogmática dos Pontífices Romanos) aqui vai um bilhete de resposta ao desafio do confrade de Combustões. Gosto de Jonathan Spence: um sinólogo criativo, learned e excelente escritor. Curiosamente, autor de grandes sucessos editoriais com tipos literários muito diversos; o meu preferido, o já citado por MCB, The Palace Memory of Matteo Ricci (em que estante estará?). Inovador em termos biográficos Emperor of China. Informativo To Change China. Western Advisers in China. Igualmente muito interessantes os constantes do menu d'O Jansenista: The Chan's Great Continent e, sobretudo, essa incrível e kafkiana reconstrução da burocracia imperial in actu: Treason by the Book. Em tempos que já lá vão, conheci Jonathan Spence em casa de amigos comuns, em Yale; um homem melancólico, gentil e despretencioso.

SINICA - II



James Hevia - Learned and quite Boring

CONSTANTINOPOLITANA RESIDUAL

Incluindo o meu Norwich favorito

A MINHA CONTRIBUIÇÃO PARA A PRESIDÊNCIA - Francês e Chinês Técnico

Constantinopla a Vôo de Turca

Can Atilla "Sultanlar Askina"

Can Atilla "Cariyeler ve Geceler"

CARTA A ROMANOS OU A EFÉSIOS?

Uma tarde solarenga, as águas do Tejo e um convite tentador para umas horas de cabos, vento e velas afastaram-me e atrasaram-me noutras lides, como esta da blogosfera. Saúdo, pois, o Jansenista, na crença de que o que a palavra fere a palavra cura, quando, sendo escrita, ainda acreditamos que tem potencialidades para se equivaler a “segundos numa conversa ao vivo”.
Evocar S. Paulo. Eis uma boa ideia do Confrade Jansenista nesta troca de pelouros nas águas do Bósforo. Quer melhor exemplo daquilo que nos une por cima dos cismas e das brutalidades -- manifestação dessa tão debatida identidade -- que a pessoa e a palavra desse judeu nascido em Tarso, na Cilícia, na banda imperial do Império, cidadão romano que falou latim e escreveu em grego, decapitado em Roma sob Nero, esteio da mais esplendorosa doutrina que a história da Humanidade conheceu?
De facto, por voltas que demos, sobrenada sempre essa identidade, tão rica e poderosa, e que, exactamente como na lição pauliana, lhe permite, na sua grandeza, o que sugere como aceitação da “integração, nessa [nossa] civilização, da tradição bizantina-turca”, e, simultaneamente, vincar a diferença que dela mesmo, como identidade (ou, noutra perspectiva, tradição) vai a outras; recordou-o há pouco tempo o Pontífice Romano, fundado na palavra de um basileus de Bizâncio esvanecido há um ror de séculos.
O resto são, de facto, “opiniães”, conjecturas, circunstancialismos.
Vale!