Yosemite National Park (HD timelapse video)

Yosemite National Park, USA

Source:  Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

Background: here

Understanding the Sufis with William Dalrymple (video)

William Dalrymple (Wikipedia) (born 1965) is a remarkable scholar and traveller.

I first knew of him through his excellent travel book In Xanadu (1989), recounting a journey he undertook in 1986, during his second summer as an undergraduate (senior history scholar) reading history at Trinity College, Cambridge, that retraced the path taken by Marco Polo from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, famed as Xanadu in English literature, in Inner Mongolia, China.

From the Wikipedia article on Dalrymple:

"Dalrymple has lived in India on and off since 1989 and spends most of the year at his farmhouse in the outskirts of Delhi, but summers in London and Edinburgh.

"Dalrymple's interests include India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Mughal rule, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity.

"All of his seven books have won major literary prizes, as have his radio and television documentaries. His first three books were travel books based on his journeys in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. His early influences included the travel writers such as Robert Byron, Eric Newby, and Bruce Chatwin. More recently, Dalrymple has published a book of essays about South Asia, and two award-winning histories of the interaction between the British and the Mughals between the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages."

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I just came across Dalrymple's excellent 2005 TV documentary, Sufi Soul, that investigates Sufi music and spirituality (in Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, and India), a subject that has received scant attention in the West. For me, it has opened a new door onto a fascinating vista.

Sufi Soul (High video quality. No subtitle)

Another copy of Sufi Soul (of lower quality, with English subtitle)

Ivan Sytin: A Russian better known in Chinese than in English

I just bought a book entitled "为书籍的一生" ("My Life for the Book", here (in Chinese); Жизнь для книги), a re-printed 1963 Chinese (mainland) translation of the memoirs of Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin (Иван Дмитриевич Сытин (Russian Wikipedia article, with good Google translation), 绥青), a prominent Russian publisher in the era immediately preceding the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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"Through sharp and unremittingly ironic observations, Sytin describes with insight and amusement or dismay Tsarist Russia's bureaucracy, the Orthodox Church, the Imperial court, and a number of the country's most renowned writers, including Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and journalist Vlas Doroshevich."

"Sytin's memoir, a tale of Great Russian society voiced by a parvenu, depicts a pre-Revolutionary Russia of small shops, churches, convents, deep religious faith, and flawed rulers. While the Revolution eventually deprived Sytin of all means to continuing publishing, his resilience and enterprise remain a lasting legacy."

It appears that Sytin's memoirs has not been translated into English (a English translation is due for publication in June 2012), and is little known in English.

A reliable indicator of Sytin's obscurity among the Anglophones is the absence of an English Wikipedia article on him.


Sytin is therefore a rare instance of a notable Western figure whom I would not have known about were I not literate in Chinese.

Ruud, Charles A. (1990). Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851 - 1934. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press (amazon)

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(source)

Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin (24 January (5 February) 1851 - 23 November 1934), Russia's leading pre-Revolution publisher of books, magazines, and the top daily newspaper, Russian Word (Russkoye slovo).

Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin, had literate but poor peasant parents and only two years of schooling in his native village of Gnezdnikovo, Kostroma Province. Venturing first to the Nizhny Novgorod Fair at fourteen as helper to a fur-trading uncle, he apprenticed at fifteen to a Moscow printer-merchant who helped him start a business in 1876, the year of his marriage to a cook's daughter who would be vital to his success.

Like his mentor, Sytin issued calendars, posters, and tales that itinerant peddlers sold to peasants throughout the countryside. When in 1884 Leo Tolstoy needed a publisher for his simple books (the Mediator series) meant to edify the same readership, his choice of Sytin raised this unknown to respected status among intellectuals. Sytin then began to publish for well-educated readers and branched into schoolbooks, children's books, and encyclopedias by investing in the new mass-production German presses that cut per-unit costs. His rise as an entrepreneur who exploited the latest technology led contemporaries to tag him "American" in method.

Sytin claimed that he became a newspaper publisher in 1894 at Anton Chekhov's urging, and he hired able editors and journalists who made his Russian Word the most-read liberal daily in Russia. Lessening censorship and rapid industrialization in the last decades of the tsarist regime helped Sytin add to his publishing ventures and kept him a millionaire through the economic disruption of World War I. After the 1917 Revolution, Sytin received assurances from Vladimir Lenin that he could publish for the Bolshevik regime, only to be cast off as a capitalist after Lenin died in 1924. The final decade of his life was marked by gloom, austerity, and obscurity, offset only by his church attendance and his writing of memoirs (published in the USSR in 1960 in a shortened edition). His downtown Moscow apartment is today an exhibition center in his honor.

Bibliography

Lindstrom, Thaïs. (1957). "From Chapbooks to Classics: The Story of Intermediary." American Slavic and East European Review 16:190 - 201.

Ruud, Charles A. (1990). Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851 - 1934. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Watstein, J. (1971). "Ivan Sytin - An Old Russian Success Story." Russian Review 30:43 - 53. (first page)


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(source)

Ivan Sytin was called a person of rare gifts. He came from a peasant family, and his only legacy was his father's blessing. At the age of 14 he came to Moscow to make a success of his life. Sytin began with joining the book shop of merchant Sharapov. “I was tall and sturdy. I could do any kind of work,” said Sytin later. “My duties were to clean my boss's shoes, lay the table for shop-assistants, bring food for them; in the morning I had to bring water and firewood to the house, buy provisions at the market. I did everything honestly, neatly and on time”.

Soon the boss came to appreciate the efforts of the bright and zealous teenager, and appointed him his own valet. He fostered the love for reading in him. At first Sytin read religious books, then the boss began to give him rare editions. For Sharapov book trade was an accidental undertaking, and so he knew little about it, relying mostly on his assistants.

As a result of ten years of assiduous work Sytin acquired extensive experience and earned some money. With the help of his master he opened a small lithographic business, which paved the way for an enormous book and magazine publishing enterprise. When he worked at Sharapov's shop he listened to tradesmen's stories and came to the conclusion that ordinary people needed good books whose value was accessible to them. That is why he began his undertaking with printing books by the famous Russian novelists Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin and others. Inexpensive and well published, his books were in great demand. In addition Sytin began to print the “Popular Calendar”, a kind of handy encyclopedia that found its way to virtually every Russian family. By printing inexpensive but necessary edition he defeated his competitors and soon became the boss of Russia's book publication. For Sytin commerce was a means, not a goal. However, as an entrepreneur he had to abide by the laws of the book market with its free prices and competition. To compensate for the publication of inexpensive books Sytin printed costly editions, such as encyclopedias in luxury book covers meant for well-to-do people.

The success of Sytin's enterprise was based not only on his business grasp and willingness to take the risks, but also on his use of advanced printing equipment and ability to organize an excellent system of marketing.

His dream was to build near Moscow a publishing town equipped with the latest machinery, with excellent houses for the workers, with schools, hospitals and theaters, all in the name of books.

However that dream was not to come true. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution his publishing house was nationalized and Sytin lost his business. His attempts to engage in publishing books under the Soviet government ended in failure. The last years of his life he in poverty and obscurity. Sytin died in 1934. However history has preserved the memory of the man who did so much to promote enlightenment in Russia.

The Joy of Quiet: Pico Iyer

The joy of quiet

As our lives become more hectic, the need to slow down becomes more urgent

by Pico Iyer (source)

About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on "Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow".

Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began - I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign - was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? "I never read any magazines or watch TV," he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. "Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that." He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because "I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere".
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with US$2,285 (S$2,965) a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I'm reliably told, lies in "black-hole resorts", which charge high prices precisely because you can't get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago.

Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send email, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel's trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.


URGENCY OF SLOWING DOWN

The average American spends at least eight-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book The Shallows, in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a television screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down - to find the time and space to think - is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context.

"Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries," the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, "and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries." He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content - and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends - Henry David Thoreau reminded us that "the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages".

Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, "When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself." Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that "Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest", but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.



LESS AND LESS TO SAY

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because "breaking news" is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less).

And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, Dancing with the Stars), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us - between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there - are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we're so busy communicating. And - as he might also have said - we're rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.

All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don't show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can't be found on any screen.
'INTERNET SABBATH'

Maybe that's why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren't New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age.

Two journalist friends of mine observe an "Internet sabbath" every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing - or riding or bridge: Anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to "forget" their mobile phones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects "exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper".

More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are "inherently slow". The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

BENEFIT OF DISTANCE

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time).

I've yet to use a mobile phone and I've never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it's just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: It's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as "that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens".

It's vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what's going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it's only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I've been going several times a year - often for no longer than three days - to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don't attend services when I'm there, and I've never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it's only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I'll have anything useful to bring to them.

The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a three-year-old around his shoulders.

"You're Pico, aren't you?" the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we'd met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he'd been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

"What are you doing now?" I asked.

"I work for MTV. Down in LA."

We smiled. No words were necessary.

"I try to bring my kids here as often as I can," he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. "My oldest son" - he pointed at a seven-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother - "this is his third time".

The child of tomorrow, I realised, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what's new, but what's essential.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently of The Man Within My Head.