Club 29

*

I just got initiated today

&

thank you

for being my friend

 

 

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O Youth!

Penguin turns 50!

I went to the exhibition with Xinyi and we had a chill time hiding at the end of the Level 1 aisle to have our dinner.

This year, in celebration of their 50th anniversary,

they published 50 mini classics and I just got myself Conrad's 'Youth'

I love Conrad 

(& Hemingway)

 (wait, and Sir Arthur too)

For something written at the end of the 1800s to still affect me the way it did just goes to show it's a classic true to its form. 

'-the feeling that I could last for ever, 

outlast the sea, the earth, and all men;

the deceitful feeling that lures us on

to joys, to perils,  to love, to vain effort

- to death;

the triumphant conviction of strength,

the heat of life in the handful of dust,

the glow in the heart

that with every year

grows dim, grows cold, grows small,

and expires-

and expires too soon, too soon,

- before life itself.'

It's poetic, isn't it?

In His Time

He hath made every thing beautiful 

in his time: 

also he hath set the world 

in their heart, 

so that no man can find out the work 

that God maketh 

from the beginning to the end

Ecclesiastes 3:11

Asia Literary Review - Spring 2011: Burma

I was reading the Asian Literary Review by Jack Picone today on the reportage on Burma and here is the part that did strange things to my heart:

'In a run-down border clinic I saw a 14-year-old boy, given only local anaethetic, having a leg amputated with a blunt saw. The boy had stepped on a landmine during his flight from Burma. He didn't utter  sound during the operation, but his eyes had the glazed expression of someone who is in such agony he is incapable of feeling more pain.
I realised then I had seen the same expression many time before.'

This followed with images not for the faint hearted. There was a picture of the operation where the fibula and tibia were jutting out like the two pieces of bone you get after cleaning off a chicken wing. It was crude and heartwrenching as the glazed look on the face of the boy on the mirroring page stared out of the page.

Can we do something? Anything at all?

MOVE

Watch it here

WOW.