Holiday file still active. Chair for shadow.Is that a four letter word I hear? I am standing outside the small open space outside Hall's Bookshop where vehicles maneouvre and unload. Yes it is. "Fucking hell," shouts an angry man. A hired van has just failed to knock him flat. He is sturdy and agile and not above being coarse when coarseness is called for. "I'm very sorry," says the driver of the van, who looks as though he is not used to the vans ways particularly in reverse. He leans out of the window. "Are you alright?" "I'm always fucking alright." Tunbridge Wells is all the better for a little metal sometimes.
Bertrand Russell quoted in the The New York Times says: "The fundemental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt". That has always struck me as true. It explains why so many politicians appear or feel that they ought to appear so sure of themselves.
3 comments:
I enjoy the mental puzzles of your upside down shadow photos.
And aye, aye to the last paragraph.
Love the photo and also the Bertrand Russell quote!!
Thanks for both.
The Russell quotation is a bit like Yeats 'the best lack all conviction and the worst/are filled with a passionate intensity'.
Which I suppose isn't necessarily to say that all who are filled with passionate intensity are the worst, but distrusting fervour is something I can sympathise with.
Seems to me that intelligence is to question, to remain open to more information, and to try to see all sides of a question. All of which can end up with doubt and inaction, but that seems often better than false certainty and wrong action.
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