Stumbling into a bookstore along Av. Corrientes

At night, with the bright lights shining from the famous theatres, Corrientes is a galore of sightseeing, its wide avenue giving you ample space to mull and get lost in your own thoughts.

Yet the one thing that I love most about Corrientes other than the perfectly symmetrical view of the obelisk you get when crossing the road, is that littered along the street are its famous old and dusty bookstores. Walking to meet my friend and a friend of hers for our vegetarian dinner last night, I found myself unwittingly drawn to these numerous old bookstores along the avenue, all oozing with the musty yet alluring smell of good second-hand books waiting for an owner to claim them.

The bookstores make you feel like you’re in a completely different world, and with the towering bookshelves full of treasure and knowledge, it’s hard not to feel like a child in a large candy kingdom. There usually aren’t many English books, but there are plenty of old Glamour or design magazines from the 1990s, and it is common to find yellowed Mafalda comic books or a collection of newspaper articles from a particularly weird year, like 1978 for example.

I wanted to encounter a book in Spanish that was relatively easy to read yet interesting enough, not some 5-year old kid storybook talking about birds and trees. Guess what I found for a ridiculously cheap pricetag of 20 pesos? I found a book about beauty queens and make-up tips, all in good quality, full-colour pages! It was the perfect thing to read and learn Spanish! Without any hesitation of course, and at the risk of looking like a empty-headed bimbo, I bought it.

Now time to enjoy some bimbo-ness this upcoming long weekend!

: )

Forgotten pearls

I speak to this someone in solitude,
The one who knows me well.
Whom else may I find solace in,
In whom else may I dwell?

I like to talk to this someone,
Who makes me feel like no one else.
This very one not at all like some,
That wish me be somebody else.

We are all fools that have no where to hide
Falling in great disguise
To shield our precious fallible hearts
That like oysters if opened must die.

We forget that we have pearls
All waiting in full glory.
To push open the hard cracked shell
Bursting to tell their story.

We can’t remember what we
Refused to commit to memory;
So we choose instead to flip and move on
And choose no more to tarry.

This was written after being inspired by Shakespeare’s famous comedy As You Like It, whose most well know phrase has been so oft used that no one really knew its source:

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” — Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-166)

Such a luxury most do not embrace

Literature is a luxury; popular fiction is a neccesity.

How very true; we feed ourselves everything but the very best; we read mostly trash yet do not bother flipping pages of greater writers; we mix around and engage in flippant chatter with inconsequential people.

We are a sum of the things we read, eat and the people we hang around with. How does that work for you?

Happiness in an equation

Amazing how people (esp. economists) try to quantify everything in the world; I suppose being able to quantify something makes you feel more powerful; makes you believe that you can control and experiment with something that might actually be totally out of our control.

Yes, they do that even with happiness. The economics of happiness encompasses this particular equation, (gleaned from Jodi Picoult’s “19 minutes” that Jinhua has so graciously lent to me):
Happiness = Reality/Expectation.
Invert the equation and you get not the opposite of happiness, but you get HOPE.
Hope= Expectation/ Reality; so anyone whose expectations exceed reality is called an optimistic hopeful; anyone whose expectations fall short of reality is simply hopelessly pessimistic.

Sounds so easy eh? Too easy actually. Don’t really know much about the economics of happiness yet, but for more discussion on it, read Jinhua’s post at Unravelled (link provided on this page).

Mere Christianity– Part I: Appetizer

Recently, I began reading C.S.Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity”, and so far, in just a mere 50-odd pages or so, his words have brought me to a new understanding of why there must be a god, no matter how much of an atheist you are. Up till where I have read, his book has shown how the age old argument that there must not be a god because the world is an evil place, and that if there really were a god, he would not allow all this cruelty to exist, really does not work.

Look at it from this way; for us to be able to say that the world is evil would not make any sense unless there was a benchmark for man to compare the “Evilness” of the world to. So if there really was a benchmark, then only would there be any weight to calling anything either good or bad. Because we are comparing to something that is good, the world seems bad, but the very fact that we assume the existance of the presence of good, is also evidence of the fact that we believe that this “good” must have originated from somewhere/something. And this somewhere/something has to be a person or power that is higher and better than us; and hence, it defaults to the conclusion that there must be a god, where it is the Christian god, Hindu god, or whatever not. In the same light, a man cannot say that a line is crooked unless he has any idea, no matter how vague, of a straight line; if not the adjective “crooked” will be as meaningless as the word “bad”. C.S.Lewis then leads us to show why the Christian God is the real god. An argument has to be argued based on the initial assumption that the conclusion you wish to come to is true; and as in statistical hypothesis testing, you first set up a hypothesis that would eventually lead to you proving whether your hypothesis is right or wrong, and whether you should reject or accept the hypothesis in the end. On this assumption, C.S.Lewis objectively leads the reader to realize what is the truth.

So, beginning with this assumption that God is the real god of the universe, the omnipotent person and everpresent being that created the universe, it suffices to say that if he had created us, it is impossible for us to try to play god or try to even just separate ourselves from Him, who is our source of life and reason for our very existence. Just like how a flow of water can never be higher than its source, so are we as humans who can never be better or even the same as our God; the very best we can do is try to ammulate Him, but never to think that we can supercede Him or act like we are God.

Similarly, when we lose touch with our spiritual communication with God, we are like engines that try to run on anything else except the fuel that we were created to run on; and any substitute for the real fuel will only lead to a suboptimal performance and unsatisfying life. Cutting ourselves off from the Maker Himself, is as in Lewis’ words “cutting off the branch from which we are sitting.”  Amazingly true; in my msn chat with Eunice a few months previously, she said that if we had been created for fellowship with God, there is no other way that we can find true happiness unless it is in God’s presence and unless we find dependence in Him. Words of wisdom from someone I really respect.

So far, this thin book that C.S.Lewis wrote has left me in amazement; his wisdom can only have come from one source and one source alone– God. And though this book was written half a century ago, its words still resonate for every Christian that truly yearns to find meaning in his belief and decision to trust in God.

Unfortunately, I have more than 3/4 or the book to read before I can tell you more about how he finally reached his conclusion that Christianity is the truth, and how Lewis, through his originally Atheistic arguments eventually realized that whatever he was arguing against before was actually the reason for his existence. So this is just the appetizer; hope it whetted your tastebuds enough till I’ve read more.