LEONID PLOTKIN

Samuel Johnson

leonid.plotkin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:06:35 +0000

He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.

Henry David Thoreau

leonid.plotkin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:03:27 +0000

The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.

T.S. Eliot

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:31:01 +0000

Each venture is a new beginning, what there is to conquer has already been discovered, once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate, but there is no competition, there is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again.

Yasunori Kawabata — Beauty and Sadness

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:30:20 +0000

Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

Jane Hirshfield — The Heart of Haiku

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:29:51 +0000

Paths mattered to Bashō, who could — like Wordsworth or John Muir — cover twenty or thirty miles a day by foot. In his youth, it seems he traveled only as circumstances required. In mid-life, he traveled by choice, following the example of earlier poet-wanderers he admired. By the end of his life, his journeying gives off the scent of an irrefutable restlessness, a simple incapacity to stay long at home.

Basho — Narrow Road to the Interior

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:28:52 +0000

The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

Basho

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:28:30 +0000

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought

Ryszard Kapuscinski — Travels with Herodotus

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:27:57 +0000

Yes, the world teaches humility. I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how ill read I was. I realized then what now seems obvious: a culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand; one has to prepare oneself thoroughly and at length for such an encounter.

Ryszard Kapuscinski — Travels with Herodotus

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:27:34 +0000

I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormity and diversity, its poverty and riches, its mystery and incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again I was glad to travel only around Poland.

Ryszard Kapuscinski — Travels with Herodotus

leonid.plotkin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:27:08 +0000

Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers — citizens of the world.