Karl Möller

15/08/2013

Friendship

Friendship is a basic and vital human relationship that forms the social fabric of our lives. It is in and through friendships that we discover our identity, gain our sense of value and place in the world, and learn what it means to participate in community. … friendships aid the development of our self-identity. Through friendships, we discover where we want to go in life and how we should relate with others and with God. Friends help us to recognize one another and the world.

John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil

15/08/2013

Ubuntu

Desmond Tutu, commenting on someone who has ubuntu, says:

This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring, and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. … A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are … what dehumanizes you, inexorably dehumanizes me.

From No Future without Forgiveness

15/08/2013

An instrument of torture

And my final quote from Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love, this time on the Dewey decimal classification:

What a perverse invention, an instrument of torture. … Stupid, anarchic, mega-moronic. The Dewey system is a secret code invented by the Axis of Evil that binds books and librarians together in order to scare the reader off. It’s terrifying, the Dewey system. Totally inhibiting. Everything goes into it, like a mincer. Your holidays, your house, your tastes, your furniture, just everything. There’s even a classification for sexuality – and plenty of different shelfmarks for all the complications. … I’m telling you, if no-one stops them, the people on the ground floor will end up putting a shelfmark on all of us ….

15/08/2013

Homeric battle

The library is the arena where every day the Homeric battle begins between books and readers. In this struggle, the librarians are the referees. … Either they’re cowards and take the side of the mountain of books, or they bravely help the worried reader.

Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love

15/08/2013

Sparks

Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life.

Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love

12/08/2013

Rat – art

I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.

Banksy, Wall and Piece