Words for Focus

These galloping lives– the commitments & details, the lists and demands on our time can eat away at our lives until our daily rhythm is defined by bits and pieces–not passions and purpose. I speak from my own experience– and am recognising my daily struggle to stay present and aware. In the moments of the Salon, my attention is drawn deep into language and meaning– and then into the words of others who are also responding to the ideas and art before us. It is a wonderfully rich and sharp time together; when I am able to take the gift of this awareness, the ability to pay attention and shut out the noise of the thousand clamouring things that need to be done–my relationships and movement through life is simply better. Each member of the Salon community offers insights and a way of seeing that broadens my own–I emerge from our work together with a cleansed and renewed perspective. Two studies are in the process of finishing our 15 week study of Mann’s Magic Mountain just now: while at moments the climb has been hard, the gift of our work together is a clarity on the work of living in the knowledge of our mortality, a deeper understanding of the struggle between the realm of ideas and the urges of passion, some stirring meditations on the embrace of suffocating snow and studies on the sublimity of music…

Again I am living the lesson that to read a few books deeply is more satisfying than trying to read it all. Wishing you all renewed attention and reading time…

behind-time-by-Tielman

COMING SALONS in Paris
April 4th– Short Story Intensive: Alice Munro and Eudora Welty
April 5th–The Magic Mountain– first third
April 6th–The Magic Mountain second third

COMING SALONS IN London
20 MARCH LIT IN PIT— Salon special in collaboration with Wendy Meakin and Pitfield– an evening of food, wine and The Wasteland

April 1st or April 2nd: 10 week study of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick begins

April 28th: Five week study of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! begins (Mondays 8-10 PM)

April 24th: ONe meeting study of Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets”

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