hum

- Move body
- Still mind

I have wept three times in my life. Once, when my first opera failed. Once again, the first time I heard Paganini play the violin. And once, when a truffled turkey fell overboard at a boating picnic.

Rossini

Step out of
your mind, watch
yourself from afar
very far … Can
you see? The
universe is always
right, there can
be no wrong

Everything is perfect

They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.

Banksy

I knew from advertisements I had seen in the local papers that for 600 lire I could get a frame built to my measurements in Genoa. Out of my slender savings I took enough for the train fare to Genoa and back, gave my measurements, and handed over the 600 lire. I would have to buy the fittings and tyres from my errand-boy salary. Oh how my legs used to ache at night through climbing all those stairs during the day! But I’m glad I did, because it surely made my legs so strong.

“Come back within a week your frame will be ready” said the owner of the cycle shop.”

But it wasn’t ready, and not the next week, and not the next. For eight weeks I threw precious money away taking the train to Genoa and still no made-to-measure bike for me. The fellow just couldn’t be bothered making a frame for a skinny country kid who didn’t look as if he could pedal a fairy-cycle, let alone a racing bike. I used to cry bitterly as I went back home without the frame. On the ninth journey I took a frame home. But it wasn’t a ‘made to measure’. The chap just took one down off the rack. I was furious inside, but too shy to do anything about it.

Those who knew Mario and Marisa Merz understood that if you invited one artist, you got both. So they installed themselves for several weeks in San Gimignano, turning up together to eat lunch and sit under the trees. I sat with them often, observing Mario at close quarters. I dearly wanted to film him, but was advised against it. Marisa is totally camera phobic; Mario might not have liked it either, and he could famously be quite monstrous. But Mario was more knowing. He had already remarked that he had heard I made “beautiful films”, and I think he knew what he wanted.

So when eventually I asked, “Mario, can I film you?” he replied, “Yes, but no speaking,” and immediately sat himself in a chair under a tree, cupping a huge pine cone in his lap.

Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Viktor Frankl