Tuesday, 30 December 1997
New things, like modern technology, are symbols of the future – the unknown no-one has ever visited, with no certainties or beacons, about which there are no stories; the darkness we’re rushing in headlong.
Old things are symbols of the past – the familiar, about which information has been recorded, and about which more is still being written; a world full of stories everybody knows. (And now I’m forced to stop writing because the old, overheated train – technology from an earlier era – is making me nauseous with its rocking and swaying.)
Thursday, 1 January 1998
My first relatively intelligent thought of the year sprang from a conversation around two o’ clock this morning in the Urban Bar: The problem with the middle class, I announced to a group of people sitting around a table, is that it’s a relatively modern phenomenon. It doesn’t have enough valuable traditions.
Can days like Christmas and New Year and birthdays be compared to, for example, ancestral traditions, legends of the warrior, or marches that have been commemorating an event in the same way for the past 700 years? (To name just a few examples.)
A significant percentage of the younger members of the International Middle Class are also disillusioned by what they are offered, and do not consider it worthwhile to build on.
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Note added on 7 July 1998: The younger members of the middle class did not do anything themselves to earn the relative comfort and security being offered to them. They did not build the proverbial house from its foundation. This causes some people to feel insecure about themselves and their abilities. Many parents don’t understand this. Neither do many younger members of the community.
Friday, 2 January 1998
A specific language need not be spoken universally, and thus have universal value, to be valuable to people who use it to fulfil their daily needs, and to get from point A to point B.
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