So grave is the current crisis that Rupert’s four oldest children – James, Lachlan, still a board member despite quitting to run his own business in Australia, Elisabeth, whose independent production company was bought by News Corp this year, and Prudence, the only one without a senior position in the business – converged on London for a crisis meeting this week.
This moment, so
meaningless … and yet
One day I walked to the architect Brunelleschi’s Cappella dei Pazzi near Santa Croce. There was no one else in the vast, domed room. I sang a note. The inside of the dome was constructed to hold notes for a long time—as if by providence, not physics—and soon after the first note I sang another one, a third above the last, and the two notes joined above me and were sustained, locked together in a buzzing consonance. It was a metaphor, I thought: Here in Italy I was in harmony with myself.
[…]
On the bus on the way to pick up the suit from the tailor, I was caught without a ticket. (I’d run for the bus; the ticket counter was closed.) I had to exit the bus to pay the fine, and when the officer noticed that the other side of the chilly street was bathed in sunshine, he suggested that we move and do the paperwork there. He had combined duty with pleasure, the way people did in Italy.
Is buddhism a way of life or is it a religion? You should know the answer to that question. It is a religion … for tax purposes.
The music business is so funny. They say: ‘Make the record, then you can get paid on the gig.’ Then they’ll say: ‘Do the gig, and that’ll help you sell the record.’ Most musicians make their living teaching. They can’t make money on the gig and they can’t make money making records, so they all become college professors and they teach all these stupid rich kids how to play bad jazz.
It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.
Do not believe a thing simply because it has been said. Do not put your faith in traditions only because they have been honoured by many generations. Do not believe a thing because the general opinion believes it to be true or because it has been said repeatedly. Do not believe a thing because of the single witness of one of the sages of antiquity. Do not believe a thing because the probabilities are in its favour, or because you are in the habit of believing it to be true. Do not believe in that which comes to your imagination, thinking that it must be the revelation of a superior Being. Believe nothing that binds you to the sole authority of your masters or priests. That which you have tried yourself, which you have experienced, which you have recognized as true, and which will be beneficial to you and to others; believe that, and shape your conduct to it.
The good news is staring us in face and we won’t engage. Carbon zero energy can be produced on the scale needed - advanced geothermal, solar, wind, plutonium-fuelled nuclear reactors – yet we won’t ramp up our investment. Energy use could be reduced by 50%, societies could become more fair and resilient, our cultural lives could become richer, more exciting. Do we really have to wait for some grand reckoning, a human/environmental disaster and loss of much of our biodiversity before we all collectively wise up?
An ethnographer I know who worked among peasant communities in the Amazon found that many of the people he met were obsessed by the idea of moving to the cities. In view of the hellish nature of many Brazilian favelas – especially in the booming Amazonian towns – he wanted to know why. “You have a wonderful life here: the rivers are teeming with fish, your gardens are crammed with food, you work an hour or two a day to meet your needs. You can’t read or write: if you move to the city, you’ll have to beg or steal or sell your body to survive,” he pointed out. “What you say is probably true,” they answered, “but in the city you can dream.”