hum

As the evening progressed, I wandered around to discover that Jobs had gone off with the nine-year-old birthday boy to give him the gift he’d brought from California: a Macintosh computer. Two other party guests wandered into the room and looked over Jobs’s shoulder. ‘Hmmm,’ said the first, Andy Warhol. ‘What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!’ The second guest, Keith Haring, the graffiti artist whose work now commands huge prices, went over. Warhol and Haring asked to take a turn at the Mac, and as I walked away, Warhol had just sat down to manipulate the mouse. ‘My God!’ he was saying, ‘I drew a circle!’ “
But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answer seemed unrehearsed to me: ‘Older people sit down and ask, “What is it?” but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?”‘

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

Castiglione’s guide stressed the kind of attitude that should accompany the many talents of a polymath, an attitude he called “sprezzatura”. A courtier should have a detached, cool, nonchalant attitude, and speak well, sing, recite poetry, have proper bearing, be athletic, know the humanities and classics, paint and draw and possess many other skills, always without showy or boastful behavior, in short, with “sprezzatura”. The many talents of the polymath should appear to others to be performed without effort, in an unstrained way, almost without thought. In some ways, the gentlemanly requirements of Castiglione recall the Chinese sage, Confucius, who far earlier depicted the courtly behavior, piety and obligations of service required of a gentleman. The easy facility in difficult tasks also resembles the effortlessness inculcated by Zen, such as in archery where no conscious attention, but pure spontaneity, produces better and more noble skill. For Castiglione, the attitude of apparent effortlessness should accompany great skill in many separate fields. In word or deed the courtier should “avoid affectation … (and) … practice … a certain sprezzatura … conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”.

“Where I come from, burning weed is a habit … something I’ve inherited like a ghetto man should,” offers Sheeran, who comes from Framlingham in Suffolk, a market town voted the No 1 place to live in Britain by Country Life magazine.

The answer is that the Buddha was an incorrigible optimist.
“I am confident,” he once said, “confident with the highest of confidence.”

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.

Nature is my religion, in a way, and I see sound as celebration of that.

You all know that there are some embarrassing truths that you can’t really escape as a politician. I’ve got a confession. I was at the same school as the party leader. There we were at this antiquated redbrick establishment … with green fields of exceptional lushness. It’s absolutely true. I was at the same north London primary school as Ed Miliband.

La Calabria, oggi, è la terra con più morti ammazzati d’Europa.