Shut, lock up; quick, quick: one runs to beg assistance from the sheriff; the others hastily shut up the shop, and bolt and bar the doors inside. The multitudes begin to increase without, and the cries redouble of: bread! bread! open! open!
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.
A gentleman is someone who is able to describe Sophia Loren without using his hands.
An Italian childhood might not produce adults who are more brilliant or adventurous or thrusting than elsewhere, but it produces people who are marvellously adept at setting up that sympathetic resonance, no matter what situation they find themselves in. Flying in from the cold, this ability arouses our suspicions if not our hackles, all those ready smiles and expansive gestures, all those hearts on sleeves: how can they mean it? How can they be sincere?
After a while, the penny drops and we see that sincerity is beside the point. What matters is to be on the same wavelength as the person in front of you, whether you care for them or not, whether or not you will ever see them again.
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.