Quote
Alain de Botton: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (via)… in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule.


![[harvard square may fair, 2011]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkj1m0Qcal1qz7wpmo1_500.jpg)
![[ireland: june 2002]
“In 1929 the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.” (Utne)](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkdft5HxXg1qz7wpmo1_r2_500.jpg)

![[saratoga springs: dec 2010]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_le3j2zJyU71qz7wpmo1_r1_500.jpg)