These are my days of silence. Starring away so far into this blank mind. The humid summer breeze does not help to ease my worries. I am all alone again. When will this every end? Why am I destined to be in this barren land? I have myself to keep me company. And this Macbook helps me a lot in keeping me sane. The vast digital entertainment on the internet and the endless wwws.coms become my saviour for another day and another day and another day till I am brought back to my true destination. Have I make a mistake of coming back to this land early? Why are my decision making so aimless and unprecise? I cannot go on like this. I do not want to end up tearing at night. Keep me sane for another 5 months God. You are my true saviour and my company throughout this journey of loneliness.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

[	Tags	|	vincent's starry night	]
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Vincent Van Gogh

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999

Van Gogh's night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village is a place of quiet order. Connecting earth and sky is the flamelike cypress, a tree traditionally associated with graveyards and mourning. But death was not ominous for van Gogh. "Looking at the stars always makes me dream," he said, "Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."

The artist wrote of his experience to his brother Theo: "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." This morning star, or Venus, may be the large white star just left of center in The Starry Night. The hamlet, on the other hand, is invented, and the church spire evokes van Gogh's native land, the Netherlands. The painting, like its daytime companion, The Olive Trees, is rooted in imagination and memory. Leaving behind the Impressionist doctrine of truth to nature in favor of restless feeling and intense color, as in this highly charged picture, van Gogh made his work a touchstone for all subsequent Expressionist painting.

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[	Stimmung	|	optimistic	]
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Elie Wiesel: Night

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died. 

Night is an autobiographical work by Elie Wiesel based on his experience, as a young Orthodox Jew, of being sent with his family to the German death camp at Auschwitz, and later to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Wiesel was 17 years old when Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945 by the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Having lost his faith in God and humanity, he vowed not to speak about his experience for ten years, at the end of which he wrote his story in Yiddish, which was published in Buenos Aires in 1955. In May that year, during an emotional meeting with the French novelist François Mauriac, he was persuaded to write the story for a wider audience. Fifty years later, the 109-page volume, described as devastating in its simplicity, ranks alongside Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature.

Wiesel deploys a sparse and fragmented narrative style, with frequent shifts in point of view. It is "the style of the chroniclers of the ghettos," he writes, "where everything had to be said swiftly, with one breath. You never knew when the enemy might kick in the door ..." ^[5] The recurring themes are Wiesel's increasing disgust with mankind and his loss of faith in God, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and the teenager becomes his resentful caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."

Night is the first book in a trilogy — Night, Dawn, and Day — reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust. The titles mark his transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of counting the beginning of a new day from nightfall, from Genesis (1:5): "And there was evening, and there was morning, one day."  "In Night," Wiesel said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end — man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."

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Our Deepest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measures. it is our light not our darkness that most frightened us. You are playing small does not serve the world that was nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people would not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we all let our own light shine, we unconsiously give people permission to to the same. As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberate others.

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Turning 30.

I was hunting around for picture around my neighbourhood with my nikon D70 and my bicycle. Found my prey. Spiral Staircase behind at the park behind my house. I took lots of picture there. Espcially pictures of scribbled love, hate, lust, pathetic, mushy, choking messages. As I was searching for shots, there was this partiular scribbled love message that caught my eyes. A love message from a 32 year old to a 34 year old. 

I wonder why the hell are they not married yet and still caught up in mushy love spells. I just realise how it feels turning 30 year old can be. Grown ups!! (sigh). Settled down without being complacent. Worldly wise, but not so worldly wise. You finally realised that you are not going to live forever. You long for love that is going to be there for you when you near death. Suddenly the taste of present latte become sweeter than you ever had before. You should not let your inevitable death put a dumper on things. Do not let long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time. Whether you are enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, or have recently moved into a more adult, more committed way of life with someone you love, you should not let your age or death hinder your perogative. You are never too old or too late to enjoy your freedom at 30. It is difficult to imagine a truly awful way of turning 30.

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Freedom to Choose

We humans are born with choices. Choices to make and to live with the consequences that we have chosen. But sometimes we are glued to the perceptions on what people think that are best for us. We tend to live life through peoples' trends, to which might not be best for us but favourable or promising to our future. For example doing a subject, lets say BioScience, which is a promising for the economy but not favorable to our interest. We ought to fight for our freedom of choice. To do things that we are most interested in rather than doing something our parents think that is good for us and our future. Why must we be enslaved to the words of others? Why must we be enslaved to the things which they think are best for us? Why can we choose our own? I heard people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique rights, the more enslaved they seemd to be to others' wishes.For example, living with parents' wishes, they are enslaved to a mariage in which they had promised to stay with the other person 'for the rest of their lives', to the bathroom scles, to the diet, to half finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of sayin 'No' or 'It's over', to weekedns when they were obliged to have lunch with people they dont even like. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their indentical days and nights passed, days and night in which adventure were just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say, 'I'm not interested. I'm not in the mood.' How could they possibly know if thy were in the mood or not if they had never tried? But there was no point in asking; the truth was they were afraid of any change that would upset the world they had grown used to.