The unconventional David Walsh

Reflection MONA by Tracey Croke, Flicker creative commons

'I feel fear ... it's very rational that I feel fear in terms of a biological response. It makes sense to have built into me something that makes me fear death ... The sheer fact that I can face death is a huge privilege ... the chance of me being here is astronomical ... I had to go through incredibly fortuitous process to have the opportunity to contemplate death ... so I hope that I'm rational enough that  every time I think - soon I'll be dead -  I think, but right now I'm well and truly alive. That's the great privilege of facing death, having the opportunity to contemplate it in the first place ... '

November 2014, David Walsh, founder of Museum of Old and New Art.
Interviewed by Phillip Adams at Sydney Writers' Festival
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/public-forum-with-david-walsh-and-phillip-adams/5960560

J B Priestley

Photo by Evonne, Flickr creative commons

'As we grow older we are apt to forget that the despair of the young is even more gigantic and immediately overwhelming than their hopefulness: we never again face such towering blank walls of misery.'

Hope is a rope

Photo of Fred Beckey by Corey Rich

Michael J. Ybarra, 'The Old Man, His Mountains', The Wall Street Journal, 10 November 2011
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204485304576645473106063438

Die Hoffnung is ein Seil.
(Hope is a rope.)      Angelus Silesius

'Forces of pressure pose and define a question. But it is the forces of aspiration which formulate and offer an answer. It is as though human beings - personalities and/or collectivities - who are burdened by the weight of necessities, found something like a rope to be a message, an announcement, a 'revelation', a gospel. Whether they believe this rope to have come from elsewhere, or whether they think it came from within themselves is of no consequence. In both cases it is a rope that they throw in the air, in other words, into space, into the clouds, into the sky. To the observer, it seems that there is nothing to keep it up, except for the impalpable and inconsistent worlds of fantasy, wanderings and absurdity. And yet this rope is anchored. It holds. And when humans grab hold of it and pull themselves, it takes the strain, it maintains its rigidity ... '

Henri Desroche, translated by Carol Martin-Sperry 1979,  The Sociology of Hope, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.