Compassion = a deep awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering.
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion.
– Eckhart Tolle
Art by Duy Huynh.
Glow-worm = a beetle, the females and young of which produce a green light from the tail.
“We are all worms. But I believe I am a glow-worm.”
– Winston Churchill
Art by Asako Eguchi.
Sweep = to clean especially a floor by using a brush to collect the dirt into one place from which it can be removed.
Sweep along = to make somebody very interested or involved in something, especially in a way that makes them forget everything else.
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
–Jorge Luis Borges
Art – Henri Julien Rousseau‘s tiger.
Silt = sand, soil, mud, etc., that is carried by flowing water and that sinks to the bottom of a river, pond, etc.
“Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje’s words are plain wizardry about visible wars and the invisible, the ones we battle everyday with us, shadows, dust and smoke. Nobody has molded love and life in such astounding stories.
He was born on the 12th of September, 73 years ago, in Sri Lanka.
Art by Vincent van Gogh.
Tremendous = very great in amount or level, or extremely good:
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
–Erich Fromm
Art by Christian Schloe.
Go-between = someone who takes messages between people who are unable or unwilling to meet:
“Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”
–Vladimir Nabokov
Art by Vincent Van Gogh.
By-product = something that is produced as a result of making something else, or something unexpected that happends as a result of something else:
“Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well lived.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Art – the fantastic mix of color and light by Eugene Lushpin.
Glitch = a small problem or fault that prevents something from being successful or working as well as it should.
“It is your glitch that makes you great.”
–Steven Furtich
Art by Duy Huynh.
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” -Franz Kafka
I illustrate with one of the incredible worlds of Vladimir Kush.
Poramboke = land that belongs to the government.
As this word has something of a tribal connotation, I illustrate with a tribal picture, not necessarily pertaining to the same culture. Just a beautiful painting epitomizing traditions and stories any culture should cherish and preserve.
Art by Cheng Weidong.