‘For Hermann Cohen the millenial condition of exile, the sorrow of the Diaspora, had enabled the Jew to engage with the "Lord of all creation" as he is declared in The Book of Micah. This engagement entailed a universalist humanism older and more tenacious than that of the Enlightenment. To this faith, nationalism was adverse.’
George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement, February 27 2004
‘At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth's motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.’
Steven Weinberg, Nature magazine, 27 November 2003. Full text at Nature website.
‘In some respects, the actual goals which inspired the students' revolt of May 1968 in Paris, for all the borrowings of modernist froms from Situationism, Dada, Surrealism, avant-garde cinema, and the like, were closer to Schiller than to any twentieth-century writer. The picture of a restored harmony within the person and between people, as a result of 'décloisonnement', the breaking down of barriers between art and life, work and love, class and class, and the image of this harmony as a fuller freedom: all this fits well within the original Romantic aspirations. The basic notions could have been drawn from the sixth of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. This picture comes close at times to a pre-Schopenhauerian perspective.’
Charles Taylor, ‘Sources of the Self’, pp. 496-7
‘I think in a hundred years or less from now, the image of words projected on screens of limitless kinds and flowing directly as sounds into ears - even beyond what technological means exist at present - will have made the book like a stone tablet dug up by archaelogists.’
Nadine Gordimer, in interview, 2003, quoted in the Times Literary Supplement Calendar 2004.
‘Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 225.
‘She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 165.
‘In school she [Kitty] was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 102.
‘It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacitiies for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. Some have ended their relations with him rather than continue as figures in the epic poem he is always composing inside his head, the story of his life and passions; but others (Clarissa among them) enjoy the sense of hyperbole he brings to their lives, have come even to depend on it, the way they depend on coffee to wake them up in the mornings and a drink or two to send them off at night.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 61.
‘These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 18.
‘... as if everything in the world ... has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.’
Michael Cunningham, ‘The Hours’, p. 12.
‘If you can't open your Personal Folders file (.pst) or Offline Folder file (.ost) file, or you suspect that your .pst or .ost data file is corrupt, you can use Scanpst.exe, the Inbox repair tool, to diagnose and repair errors in the file. Scanpst.exe scans only the .pst or.ost file, making sure that the file structure is intact. It doesn't scan your mailbox on the Microsoft Exchange server.
Scanpst.exe is installed when you install Microsoft Outlook and is located at Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\.
Microsoft Outlook help files
‘A utility called PST Backup enables you to make an exact copy (in the same file format) of a .pst data file, copy the backup file to your hard disk or to a network share, and specify a time interval at which Outlook will prompt you to back up a file. Use the backup file to restore the current .pst file in the event that it becomes corrupted or deleted. To use the utility, you must download it from the Microsoft Outlook downloads site.
Microsoft Outlook help files
‘When Doug Reese put up his Web site, he felt he was answering a call. A college wrestling coach with a long involvement in Christian youth ministries, he wanted to spread a Christian message to people who were not getting it.
Instead of working through his Methodist church, he created a site with no overtly religious images or affiliation, and articles about weight lifting, nutrition and profiles of athletes. Only after users click a few links do they start to see biblical passages or the religious testimonials of the athletes.
"I wanted it to look like a sports magazine," said Mr. Reese, who coaches at the University of Minnesota at Morris and hopes to turn his three-year-old site into a full-time ministry. "It's a little covert. I know that religion or Christianity is a turn-off with a great part of the population. I didn't want to shove it in people's faces." ’
John Leland, New York Times, 31 January 2004. Full text at the New York Times website.