Solitude and Leadership

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

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lucentshadow:

Your Love is Black | Kaskade

The other side of electronic music.

It’s true I loved you once
It’s true you were once mine
I lost my way

“I administer them,” replied the businessman. “I count them and recount them. It is difficult. But I am a man who is naturally interested in matters of consequence.”

The little prince was still not satisfied.

“If I owned a silk scarf,” he said, “I could put it around my neck and take it away with me. If I owned a flower, I could pluck that flower and take it away with me. But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven…”

“No. But I can put them in the bank.”

“Whatever does that mean?”

“That means that I write the number of my stars on a little paper. And then I put this paper in a drawer and lock it with a key.”

“And that is all?”

“That is enough,” said the businessman.

“It is entertaining,” thought the little prince. “It is rather poetic. But it is of no great consequence.”

On matters of consequence, the little prince had ideas which were very different from those of the grown-ups.

“I myself own a flower,” he continued his conversation with the businessman, “which I water every day. I own three volcanoes, which I clean out every week (for I also clean out the one that is extinct; one never knows). It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them. But you are of no use to the stars…”

The businessman opened his mouth, but he found nothing to say in answer. And the little prince went away.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

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Slow Dancing In A Burning Room
John Mayer

We’re going down
And you can see it too
We’re going down
And you know that we’re doomed
My dear

We’re slow dancing in a burning room

Shores of Orion
God Is An Astronaut

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!” And a little later you added: “You know— one loves the sunset, when one is so sad … “ “Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?” But the little prince made no reply.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry The Little Prince

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”
    And a little later you added:
“You know— one loves the sunset, when one is so sad … “
“Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?”
    But the little prince made no reply.
              Antoine de Saint Exupéry   The Little Prince

2011 - DJ Earworm turns straw into gold again. As the last semester of college begins, I find myself unable to wait for the new challenges, people, and unforgettable nights to come.

And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us
‘Cause we’re just under the upperhand
And go mad for a couple of grams
And she don’t want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland
Or sells love to another man
It’s too cold outside
For angels to fly

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.

Milan Kundera, Ignorance (via sunrec)