Our Daily Routine

Throughout most of the Summer we have been without a car here on week days, so my carefree days of trips to the parks and museum were ended. Everyday we took the only walk available to us—from home to the derelict Hong Kong Garden and back—twice: once in the morning and once in the evening, avoiding the unbelievable heat which often reached 100°F. Here is a plan of the route (the house is on the right, the restaurant at the left):






1. The thinner line represents a shortcut through the driveway of the neighboring house that is sometimes taken for variety; the small loop is the path up to the front porch. As you can see, ours is the third of three houses sheltered together by woods from the outside world—even that thin screen of shrubbery just above the house looks quite impenetrable from the ground. The following pictures were taken last July.

Anyone who actually wants to follow my detailed comments on 21 more photos in the series and follow the route in full can look here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10/Walk

Dali

Someone in the Dlai community asked for quotes and I supplied the following.

"The differnce between me and a mandman, is that I am not mad."

"When I was three years old I wanted to become a pastry chef. When I was four I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambition has been increasing exponentially every since."

Both by Dali. The Secret Life and especially the 100 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (quoting the title from memory, might be slightly differnt) are full of these aphorisms.

They are quite logical and rational by the way. The first one means that the madman is detatched from reality becuase he is mad, while Dali is detatched from relaity to an equal degree, but becuase he realizes modern relaity is mad.

The second one is obviosuly a complex pun revolving around the Napoleon pastry (I have not seen the French original but the difference in the usage of articles may make it cleverer in that language), but it also hints at his need to display himself rather than to be a mere creator separate from his work.

Its strange but I always liked the Napoleon one well enough to have memorized it, but I never had any inklging of any meaning it might have. Even when I wrote down the analysis of the madman quote I was thinking," "Pity I can't also say what the other one means for symmetry." But then that interpretation just spilled out like automatic writing. The interpretation I offered is not very profound, I will concede, it is even obvious, but it was a strange sensation to stumble on it like that.