var article_index = {"love":[{"id":1,"category_id":3,"name":"Falling for the wrong person","description":"We fall for someone and become enchanted by them. Then when we really get to know them they turn out to be completely the wrong person for us. And yet not very long after that, something similar happens. We keep making the same mistakes. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat\u2019s going on? In his essay on love, Stendhal locates the source of the problem in the process of falling in love. When we fall in love our minds do something strange \u2013 and rather wonderful \u2013 to the other person. To explain what this is, Stendhal gets us to consider an analogy. In the city of Salzburg \u2013 he tells us \u2013 the locals like to pick up a small twig and throw it into the shaft of an abandoned salt mine. Two or three months later they return and extract the twig. Which emerges utterly transformed \u2013 covered in sparkling crystals; it looks amazing. It doesn\u2019t matter what kind of twig you use, the result is always the same. The twig has been <i>crystallised<\/i>. Of course we know how this happens: the moist air of the mine is filled with tiny salt particles which attach themselves to whatever is left in there long enough. Stendhal thinks that a related kind of crystallization occurs when we fall in love. Someone who is fairly nice comes along and gets suspended \u2013 as it were \u2013 in the moist, salty atmosphere of our imaginations. We encrust this person with all our hopes, our longings and ideals. They are transformed by our imaginations from the perfectly decent human being which they are into something  astonishing \u2013 the best person who has ever lived, the answer to all our problems. This is the process of falling in love. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf we get together with this person, the rough and tumble of life tends to reverse the process. Gradually we get to see the other person as they really are, not as our fantasies have made them. The irony is that getting to know the person now feels disappointing. The magic wears off. We toss them aside. And then along comes another interesting twig\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nStendhal\u2019s point isn\u2019t that we should try to avoid falling in love. But if we understand that falling in love often involves imagining (rather than actually knowing) what the other person is like, we can manage the next steps a lot better.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Stendhal","painting_name":"Love","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411735627Stendhal_-_Love.jpg","stub":"i-keep-on-falling-for-the-wrong-person","order":1,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411735627Stendhal_-_Love.jpg"},{"id":4,"category_id":3,"name":"I don\u2019t give many compliments","description":"Compliments are central to love, says Plato, because love is essentially a kind of <i>admiration<\/i>. When we truly love someone \u2013 love being a deliberate, long-term achievement \u2013 we are able to see, more clearly than other people, what is genuinely good about them. We are not making it up, or just imagining. We are genuinely noticing what is really lovely in the other person\u2019s character.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur problem is we don\u2019t tend to put enough effort into admiring what is good about people, even those we claim to love. We are too vague when we give compliments. Perhaps one of the things that first attracted you to your partner was their generosity, for example. Now you scarcely give it a thought. Yet if you looked into this more closely you would see this person is not generous to everyone; they have a particular focus: they are moved by people who suffer but who are too dignified to ask for help. This is something which you can, and should, appreciate in them. But it took effort to notice.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPlato\u2019s big point is that in being more attentive, we are also educating ourselves. For now we appreciate more what generosity is: not simply a response to a plea for help, but the capacity to intuit a need which the other does not fully express. It is a quality you can see, and love, elsewhere. And cultivate in yourself.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Plato","painting_name":"The Symposium","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411735944Plato_-_Symposium.jpg","stub":"i-dont-give-many-compliments","order":2,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411735944Plato_-_Symposium.jpg"},{"id":13,"category_id":3,"name":"How did we start hating each other?","description":"One feature of long-term relationships is that they tend to set up cycles of mutual hate. One evening \u2013 inspired perhaps by someone arriving home late \u2013 one person will get angry, which will make the other person morose, a response which will make the other person even more furious...<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat is striking is that the escalating steps can come to feel like moves in a well-worn battle plan, or a ritual war display. \u2018Here we go again\u2019, one feels. The remedy for this, proposes Sue Johnson in <i>Hold Me Tight<\/i>, is to replay the familiar steps in the arguments you have, with the accompanying feelings: you say this\u2026 which makes me feel\u2026 and so I say\u2026 etc. To get started, take a deep breath and invite your partner on a walk for the purpose of talking about how you argue. Look closely at each small emotional move each of you makes in an escalating row. One person gets angry. Why are they angry? What is it, fully and completely, that they tend to feel at this point? Give space for the embarrassing, hidden parts of the answer to come forward \u2013 in your own mind as well as theirs. Deep down, perhaps, you feel betrayed: you fear being alone. And so you get angry partly out of panic. This anger then, on some level, terrorises the other person, whose response is \u2018flight\u2019 rather than \u2018fight\u2019: they disappear into their shell and become morose. Yet it is precisely this response which confirms your original premonition that you are being abandoned, which, in turn, enrages you even more desperately\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe foundation of love is to be able to speak our needs in a way that moves our partner to respond. Most of the blaming \u2013 the apparent hate \u2013 in these ritual dialogues is an animal-like attachment cry, a protest against disconnection.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Sue Johnson ","painting_name":"Hold me Tight","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411737639Johnson_-_Hold_Me_Tight.jpg","stub":"how-did-we-start-hating-each-other","order":3,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411737639Johnson_-_Hold_Me_Tight.jpg"},{"id":7,"category_id":3,"name":"My partner is dull","description":"She doesn\u2019t have an affair because she is in love; she has an affair because she is bored. She is tired of her middle-class husband and his restrictive worldview. And so she loses herself not in passion for another individual, but in a glamorous fantasy of what romance should be like. She craves the trappings of an aristocratic romance \u2013 refined love: elegant jewellery, secret assignations, expensive clothes. Her ultimate ruin is not merely moral but financial.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnyone who has ever experienced periods of stagnancy in a long relationship can relate to Emma Bovary\u2019s sense of frustration. Yet, Flaubert says to us, her way of dealing with her dissatisfaction is the worst avenue imaginable. She runs from a moderate, if irritating, problem, into a disaster.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Gustave Flaubert","painting_name":"Madame Bovary","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411736475Flaubert_-_Madame_Bovary.jpg","stub":"my-partner-is-frankly-dull","order":4,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411736475Flaubert_-_Madame_Bovary.jpg"},{"id":6,"category_id":3,"name":"I find a lot of people annoying, but I don\u2019t want to be lonely","description":"There is a moment in <i>Anna Karenina<\/i> when the main character Levin is at a party. He\u2019s on the margins of a conversation in which a couple of his neighbours are arguing about farm management. Today the equivalent might be a disagreement about a restaurant or a film or the PM. Levin is struck by how annoying the two men are. They are talking past one another and Levin, who has his own ideas, thinks they are both wrong. He\u2019s bored. He starts to hate them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s an archetypal situation. If Levin escapes, he\u2019ll probably just be faced with another version of the same thing. It\u2019s not just these specific men. He realises that they are only doing what people mostly do: air their prejudices, and keep on asserting what they already think, whatever anyone else says. Levin had been imagining that he could get the two men to understand one another. Now he recognises that this isn\u2019t going to work. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThen Tolstoy gives Levin a helpful thought. Suppose, Levin thinks, I focus less on the truth of what that person is saying; suppose instead I try to see what it is that they <i>like<\/i>. Instead of judging the wisdom of what a person is saying, he gets curious about their enthusiasm: he asks why it might be appealing for them to think as they do. And once he sees them in this light, his feelings change. He sees that these are decent people \u2013 not very adept, maybe, at understanding each other, but honestly trying to set forth their own experiences. This is a liberating, helpful, move which Tolstoy wants us to use in our own lives. It frees Levin from frustration and makes him more generous \u2013 more able to get on with people who, before, he found irritating.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Leo Tolstoy","painting_name":"Anna Karenina","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411736385Tolstoy_-_Anna_Karenina.jpg","stub":"i-find-a-lot-of-people-annoying-but-i-dont-want-to-be-lonely","order":5,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411736385Tolstoy_-_Anna_Karenina.jpg"},{"id":3,"category_id":3,"name":"Heartbreak","description":"We often feel desperate when our heart is broken, but Goethe wants to teach us a sane way forward. He does this by telling us the story of Werther and  Charlotte, two young people who over the course of a few weeks develop an intense but one-sided relationship. Werther falls in love with Charlotte, but Charlotte\u2019s affections reside firmly with her very nice fianc\u00e9, whom she loves. Yet Charlotte enjoys Werther\u2019s company: they make lunch together, have great conversations, go for walks, and dance at a party. Unwittingly she gives him false hope. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWerther\u2019s love grows desperate and Charlotte becomes miserable. It becomes obvious that Werther loves her and she has to start fending him off. It comes to a head one evening when Werther turns up and she stops him, and explains that she will never be his lover. Charlotte points out the obvious but (to Werther) horrific truth that he will get over her and find someone else; that it is pointless to waste his time pining for her when there are so many other women in the world with whom he could have a real relationship. Werther goes off and shoots himself, a martyr to unrequited love. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nGoethe tells the story from inside Werther\u2019s head, so we are with Werther in his experience of rejection. Charlotte\u2019s words, although severe, are not coming from a heartless writer who just doesn\u2019t understand what it means to ache for another person\u2019s presence, to feel that everything in your life depends upon them. So Werther\u2019s extreme acting out of despair is a terrifying jolt. Even if we share his experience up to that point, we can see that he has fatally misunderstood the nature of love.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nCharlotte\u2019s lesson is hard, but ultimately more wise: if you were able to love this one person, you will be able to love someone else. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ","painting_name":"The Sorrows of Young Werther ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411735883Goethe_-_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther.jpg","stub":"i-am-suffering-from-heartbreak","order":6,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411735883Goethe_-_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther.jpg"},{"id":12,"category_id":3,"name":"I want love but not sex","description":"Our culture has not yet reached the stage of acceptance where she could say to me \u2018I just want to have sex with you and nothing more\u2019. Or where I could say to her \u2018I want you to hold me; I want to love you and look after you tenderly for the rest of my life. But the idea of sex with you makes me very hesitant\u2019. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo we suffer through evenings filled with frustration and guilt. The one who sought love but got sex feels used. The one who just wanted sex feels, if drawn into a relationship, resentful (which comes out later\u2026). What they both had in common \u2013 as they stepped out their respective front doors that fateful night, before they\u2019d ever met \u2013 was that they both thought they could get what they wanted, without at any point having to say precisely what that was.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"How to Think More About Sex","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411737563Botton_-_How_to_Think_More_About_Sex.jpg","stub":"i-want-love-but-not-sex","order":7,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411737563Botton_-_How_to_Think_More_About_Sex.jpg"},{"id":9,"category_id":3,"name":"Is it time to break up?","description":"You\u2019ve thought about it on many occasions but it never happens. You want to break up. You don\u2019t want to break up. But also: you do want to break up. It\u2019s like your brain is malfunctioning and is stuck in a circle.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe novel <i>Adolphe<\/i> takes us into this situation of being stuck. As things slowly break down between Adolphe and his lover Ellenore, they start to go through the motions of romance without really taking an interest in analysing their problems. Adolphe wants to break up but he can\u2019t bear to hurt her \u2013 or so he tells himself. So he pushes aside his complicated feelings, pretending nothing is wrong, hoping that his insincere protestations of devotion will convince her. For her part, Ellenore knows that something is wrong. Yet underneath it all she is terrified of being alone. Her response is to make Adolphe feel guilty. You do not love me, she wails, you must find the strength to leave me! You are weary of me \u2013 my love does not touch your heart!<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe tells himself that he is staying with her for <i>her<\/i> sake. But what is actually going on is that he fears getting hurt himself. His fear is: \u2018I will get hurt\u2019, but because he can\u2019t admit this to himself, he projects it: \u2018she will get hurt\u2019, to make the feeling more acceptable to his conscience. He lacks guts because he fears, deep down, that the guilt will be too painful for <i>him<\/i> to live with. So he waits for her to make the first move, so that she will be the bad one. Everything drags on in a miserable sequence of rows and reproaches.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe often don\u2019t admit to ourselves that the reason we are not leaving someone is to protect ourselves (our heart, our reputation). Generally it is a bad basis for a relationship.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Benjamin Constant ","painting_name":"Adolphe","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411737076Constant_-_Adolphe.jpg","stub":"is-it-time-to-break-up","order":8,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411737076Constant_-_Adolphe.jpg"},{"id":2,"category_id":3,"name":"We are incompatible","description":"When we fall in love we tend to think that we have encountered the single person on the planet fully suited to ensuring our own happiness. And this creates the idea that, in the search for a good relationship, perfect compatibility is the key thing to look for. Yet the fact is that almost all relationships arrive at a stage when one or both people feel that they have somehow selected the most unsuitable partner possible, someone deeply alien and annoying. Whoever we end up with is likely to be the wrong person in at least some significant ways. This is not the result of having made a bad choice, rather it is the natural result of closeness; it is what happens when things go reasonably well and you get to share your life with someone else. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo this means there is a distinctive later phase of love. We tend to associate love with the opening stages of romance. But an equally important, though perhaps less familiar, stage of love is focused on being loving towards someone who, you now realise, is far from ideal. Compatibility is an achievement of love, not its starting point. What this means is that for the long term (which is what we want from love) who you are with matters slightly less than we tend to imagine \u2013 and it matters more what capacities you develop for coping, and thriving, with someone who in many ways cannot be ideally suited to you.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOne requirement for compatibility is a special type of forgiveness, which in this book is given the unusual name \u2018katabasis\u2019 \u2013 meaning, essentially, \u2018climbing down\u2019. You climb down when you care less about being right and more about allowing your partner to think well of themselves; when you say sorry when it is not really your fault; when you make yourself be patient when you feel you can\u2019t wait; when you let an angry cutting remark from your partner wash over you; when you do a bit more than your share and don\u2019t seek praise or try to make the other person feel guilty. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nClimbing down is not, of course, the whole recipe for compatibility, but it is almost certainly a necessary ingredient. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"John Armstrong","painting_name":"Conditions of Love ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411735735Armstrong_-_Conditions_of_Love.jpg","stub":"we-are-incompatible","order":9,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411735735Armstrong_-_Conditions_of_Love.jpg"},{"id":8,"category_id":3,"name":"Am I too cautious? ","description":"Broadly speaking our society is very sympathetic to the idea of being impetuous. We like the thought of doing something on the spur of the moment. \u2018So we threw caution to the wind and here we are seven years later, happy, successful and rich\u2019. That\u2019s the idealised plot of hundreds of magazine profiles of people who start organic vegetable farms, run rental holiday businesses in Sardinia or make successful second marriages. Impetuousness speaks to us of the charms of youth \u2013 freedom, fortune favouring the brave. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn <i>War and Peace<\/i> Tolstoy draws a delightful portrait of a young woman, Natasha Rostova. She is warm, passionate, full of high-spirits and (if we read between the lines) deeply sexy. She loves dancing, she says what she thinks, and has great confidence that her charm will placate anyone whose feathers she might ruffle. However it is just this impetuous spirit that leads her to disaster. One night at the opera, she falls for the feckless Anatole Kuragin. He\u2019s handsome, ardent, dashing \u2013 and, beneath this surface, completely worthless. Natasha throws caution to the wind; she forgets everything else: her family, her fianc\u00e9, her friends. Anatole persuades Natasha to elope. This plot is foiled but a huge amount of damage is done, not least to Natasha herself. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOf course it\u2019s possible to be cautious for bad reasons: from lack of hope or imagination. This is the implicit, negative diagnosis of why people are cautious: you are cautious because you are unimaginative. But the core of good caution is the appreciation of what it at stake: good things already possessed (whose value familiarity leads us to underestimate). <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are slow to see the appeal \u2013 the charm \u2013 of being cautious or patient. We never say: \u2018I love it how she\u2019s so cautious\u2019. If we were wiser it might be one of our best compliments. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Leo Tolstoy","painting_name":"War and Peace","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1412117997Tolstoy_-_War_and_Peace.jpg","stub":"am-i-too-cautious","order":10,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1412117997Tolstoy_-_War_and_Peace.jpg"},{"id":10,"category_id":3,"name":"I just want to be loved \u2013 surely that\u2019s not asking too much?","description":"It can be so hard to get into the perfect situation in love: feeling secure, contained by another person, listened to, entertained, fed, inspired. When we are young we find this fantasy in songs and movies. We might even live out the dream with another teenager \u2013 for maybe four or five weeks. When we are older, we might wonder whether love will ever happen to us. Surely if it\u2019s something we all want, there should be more of it around?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhere is the love? The problem with this question is that we are using a single word, love, for two very different things: <i>being loved<\/i> and <i>loving<\/i>. We start out in life, if we are lucky, receiving the former: being loved. But none of us are born \u2013 lying on the bed, arms flailing, wailing \u2013 knowing in the slightest how to do the latter. For loving is an art which requires as much dedication as learning the piano or becoming a structural engineer. And we simply do not get the training we need. We don\u2019t (as yet) go to schools for loving. Our societies are fatefully bad at putting us through any initiation to begin learning the required skills.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOne example of a skill, or virtue, discussed in <i>The Art of Loving<\/i> is the ability to concentrate when someone is talking. We might think that we do this pretty well. Most people think they do, as Fromm points out. But people don\u2019t often truly take the other person\u2019s talk seriously, and they don\u2019t take their own answers very seriously either. Therefore most conversations don\u2019t touch our hearts.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPerhaps you are better than average at concentrating when someone is talking. Even then, this is not enough. Fromm wants us to be far better. For \u2018average\u2019 and \u2018a bit better than average\u2019 are both woefully bad right now \u2013 like medicine in the Middle Ages. In fact we may never have met anyone who is receptive and imaginatively attentive to the degree that some people might be in future. We just don\u2019t know, because we have never really pushed ourselves \u2013 we are like amateur athletes admiring each other, who have never met an Olympic athlete. We don\u2019t train seriously for the skills. Hence, perhaps, why there\u2019s not a lot of <i>being loved<\/i> around. And why we need to become the \u2013 sometimes lonely \u2013 lovers.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Erich Fromm","painting_name":"The Art of Loving","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411737194Fromm_-_Art_of_Loving.jpg","stub":"i-just-want-to-be-loved-surely-thats-not-asking-too-much","order":11,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411737194Fromm_-_Art_of_Loving.jpg"},{"id":5,"category_id":3,"name":"We fight over nothing","description":"It is terrible to fall into those arguments which feel utterly spiteful and out of proportion. One partner looks for the smallest excuse \u2013 a misheard word, the wrong emphasis in a question \u2013 or sometimes no excuse at all, to blow things up. Plates fly, shoes go through windows, doors are slammed.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhy do we have \u2018arguments about nothing\u2019? <i>Essays in Love<\/i> examines one underlying dynamic, which is that we fear and love at the same time. One part of us might love this person dearly. But at the same time another part of us might fear them and want to push them away. Especially at the beginning of a relationship, we are prone to a powerful fear of becoming vulnerable. Two seconds ago \u2013 so it feels \u2013 we were independent. Now, our happiness is becoming ever more closely tied to another person. This is a frightening situation to be in. What if this new person leaves? What if they get bored and decide to no longer love us back? What if they betray us? The more we love them, the stronger is our fear that we are putting our lives and our emotions at their mercy. Thus we invent reasons to kill the relationship, like arguments about nothing \u2013 not because we lack love, but precisely because, so we fear, we love too strongly.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe solution is to be more forgiving: we should allow our partners to have unexpected and often mixed motivations which they are often hardly conscious of themselves. And we should remind ourselves that behind the spiteful words there may be a simple fear of making oneself vulnerable. Arguments over nothing may turn out, on closer investigation, to be tied up with a lot that we dearly care about. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"Essays in Love","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411735994Botton_-_Essays_In_Love.jpg","stub":"we-fight-over-nothing","order":12,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411735994Botton_-_Essays_In_Love.jpg"},{"id":11,"category_id":3,"name":"I don\u2019t analyse love","description":"We tend to think in the excitement of love that love is a mysterious force \u2013 that its grip is fated and beyond understanding. We forget that more often than not it is society rather than any mysterious power which prompts us to fall in love. It might go like this: someone regales us with a story of their recent infatuation \u2013 it\u2019s all bliss, they were meant to be together; they met on a train station platform and now they are getting married. You begin to feel envious of this couple. Then later you meet someone at a party, someone you quite like, but because of the conversation you had earlier, your subconscious encourages you to see this brief encounter as the awe-inspiring opening stages of <i>love<\/i>. Love is contagious; it is never original, writes Barthes. It is provoked not by unearthly forces but by the stories we tell ourselves. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>A Lover\u2019s Discourse<\/i> does not dissolve away love. Barthes does not want us to fall out of love, nor does he want to disillusion us about its reality. He wants us to stop, to tease out all the threads, to analyse, so that next time we will be a little less in the dark when the storm clouds of passion amass themselves. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Roland Barthes ","painting_name":"A Lover's Discourse ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411737482Barthes_-_Lovers'_Discourse.jpg","stub":"i-cant-think-clearly-about-my-torment","order":13,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411737482Barthes_-_Lovers'_Discourse.jpg"}],"work":[{"id":14,"category_id":4,"name":"Annoying colleagues","description":"Your co-workers once looked so impressive. Now they are impatient, annoyed \u2013 even inclined to mock. And so the emotions build up: my colleagues are a bit offhand, becomes, my colleagues are annoying, and finally, I loathe the people I work with. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSeneca\u2019s <i>Letters<\/i> explore strategies we can use to avoid being derailed by unhelpful (but highly understandable) emotions. Lucilius, to whom the letters are addressed, complains about his profession and the superficiality of his social life. He\u2019s frustrated, irritated, disappointed. In theory Lucilius could change jobs, find new friends, run off and become the ancient Roman equivalent of a drop-out. But these are not really feasible. Seneca explores one of the big remaining options: try to manage your moods. The tendency is to feel flooded and defined by the emotion: one is overwhelmed by frustration, seething with annoyance. Seneca suggests that, instead, we should treat these feelings as visitors rather than as fundamental parts of ourselves. The irritation at annoying colleagues doesn\u2019t have to rule your soul \u2013 and define you. It\u2019s a visitor you have to live with for a while, and then it can go. You can almost inspect it: yes, there they are smirking again so now I\u2019m feeling the pain that accompanies being slighted by people who don\u2019t really know me. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nLooking closely at the real cause of the feeling moderates its impact. In rage one feels that the smirking co-workers are evil incarnate, bent on the slow, methodical dismemberment of your ego. In reality they are moderately insensitive to your feelings, more concerned with entertaining themselves than with wrecking your life. It\u2019s still annoying. It just isn\u2019t catastrophic. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Seneca ","painting_name":"Letters from a Stoic","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411727075Seneca_-_Letters_from_a_Stoic.jpg","stub":"my-office-is-full-of-people-i-dont-like","order":14,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411727075Seneca_-_Letters_from_a_Stoic.jpg"},{"id":15,"category_id":4,"name":"I\u2019m in the wrong job","description":"It\u2019s possible some days to deeply regret the line of work you have fallen into. Maybe it once looked exciting. Now you\u2019re exhausted, going round in circles and adding nothing of value to the world. One longs for the fantasy job: being an astronaut, museum educator, cabinet minister, gourmet farmer \u2013 or spy. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>The Honourable Schoolboy<\/i> takes us into the working life of Jerry Westerby, a British spy. His job involves exhilarating moments. On one occasion he has to bluff his way into the back corridors of bank in Hong Kong and coerce a corrupt manger into opening the safe. He is alone, the fire escape is his only exit; the manager might start screaming or break down in tears; a secretary might put her head around the corner at any moment. Jerry is at his finest: brave, masterful, intensely alert. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut most of Jerry\u2019s days are passed lying anxiously in tiny apartments, in cities where no one knows him. He wakes up at night petrified someone might be breaking into his room. There\u2019s a frantic burst of action, then a long wait for further instructions while his bosses are caught up in political deals and infighting. He is endlessly exposed to boredom and a sense of pointlessness. Even if he succeeds in his assignment \u2013 which is very uncertain \u2013 will it really do any good? He is defending British interests, but in bleaker moments he feels he doesn\u2019t even like his own country. So what is he doing it for? <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>The Honourable Schoolboy<\/i> is an education in pessimism. Jobs which look exciting from the outside are in reality often very boring. Astronauts, museum guides and cabinet ministers must sometimes lament their jobs and want to quit. The danger, for us, is in fantasising that life for some people is always exciting.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"John le Carr\u00e9","painting_name":"The Honourable Schoolboy","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411941545Le_Carre_-_The_Honourable_Schoolboy.jpg","stub":"im-in-the-wrong-job","order":15,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411941545Le_Carre_-_The_Honourable_Schoolboy.jpg"},{"id":18,"category_id":4,"name":"Distraction is wasting my life ","description":"On occasion, it can go from frustrating to existentially depressing. One has a vague sense of life trickling away, looking up after four hours spent on news websites, blogs, checking other people\u2019s wedding photos on Facebook, playing with Google Earth, visiting www.youporn.com...<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd yet, tantalisingly, we know that work can be just as absorbing. We can also lose ourselves in what matters \u2013 happy experiences which Csikszentmihalyi calls states of \u2018flow\u2019: those stretches of time when you forget time, when things get done. \u2018Flow\u2019 may or may not happen on a given day. But the possibility for it happening depends on sticking for long enough at a single sitting with a challenging task, a task which is a few steps beyond your current level of skill. Mastery lies in power over one\u2019s attention.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPart of Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s therapy is to remind us that the battle against distraction is a normal one (last century it might have been alcohol; this century it is pornography). The underlying cause of distraction is that the big, important tasks \u2013 the tasks which stretch us, and ultimately help us to grow up \u2013 also make us anxious. Hence the alluring suppressive power of Facebook, Sudoku, online chess. But it is precisely this anxiety we have to learn to endure, and not escape (not get up from the desk, not open a new browser window, not click on that headline), often for long periods at a time, if we are to extend our powers.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Mih\u00e1ly Cs\u00edkszentmih\u00e1lyi","painting_name":"Flow","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411727575Csikszentmihalyi_-_Flow.jpg","stub":"distraction-is-wasting-my-life","order":16,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411727575Csikszentmihalyi_-_Flow.jpg"},{"id":17,"category_id":4,"name":"I used to be so idealistic\u2026 where did it go? ","description":"When we are young start out with a natural energy \u2013 we get up early, read Shakespeare before breakfast, plan out our lives and dream of one day changing the world. Lucien, the central character of <i>Lost Illusions<\/i>, has the same drive: he is a young poet come to Paris from the provinces; he wants to make a name for himself, to be a star of the literary world. He is also fiercely idealistic. He wants to win this acclaim by writing beautiful, delicate sonnets; he wants to make beauty and truth shine in the murky world and get magnificently rewarded for doing so.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>Lost Illusions<\/i> is a cautionary tale. Balzac allows Lucien, for a time at least, to have every success. But only at a terrible cost. He must, in effect, sell his soul. Lucien publishes a couple of little poems and no-one is in the least interested. He then gets an entr\u00e9 into the world of scurrilous journalism. He learns to praise a new play not because he admires it but because one of the actresses is sleeping with the owner of the paper. He is taught how to damn an idea not because it is stupid but simply because it is advanced by the government or the opposition (depending on which paper he is writing for). As Lucien grows up, he comes to feel he has only two options: either he can keep his idealism and live a modest \u2013 even impoverished \u2013 life; or, he can give up his idealism, and rake in the rewards. He chooses the second option. But below the surface the glittering world is deeply cynical and exploitative. Soon Lucien is cast off and ruined.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThese are, in the end, not the only two options. Balzac has no doubt that worthy success could be gained without compromising one\u2019s better nature. Only, he believes, idealism cannot be vindicated quickly, or without enduring hardship. It\u2019s not so much Lucien\u2019s idealism that turns out to be an illusion. It is the naive (yet natural) conviction that success, if it is to come at all, must come early on, and without suffering.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Honor\u00e9 de Balzac","painting_name":"Lost Illusions","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411727343Balzac_-_Lost_Illusions.jpg","stub":"i-used-to-be-so-idealistic-where-did-it-go","order":17,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411727343Balzac_-_Lost_Illusions.jpg"},{"id":23,"category_id":4,"name":"Envy","description":"Envy: finding out, perhaps via one sentence on Facebook, that someone is doing high-status things which you want to do but feel as though you can\u2019t, is traumatic. Someone else got on and started that business you had been musing about. Someone else finished a medical degree. Someone else is on stage at the Global Financial Summit. The disbelief, in the first moment, and then the anger \u2013 at that person, at yourself \u2013 tends to climax with a long stretch of remorse at not having done more with your time. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nLa Rochefoucauld is aware of how envy can turn poisonous. His antidote is that we should learn to feel a generous type of pity. We should remember that all actions, even the most admirable, involve desperate and often pitiful motives, which deserve not envy but sympathy. We are all trying to be loved. We are all trying to make up for the time we feel we have somewhat wasted. Your rival is on stage, yes, but inwardly he is struggling. In the face of the display, we should remember the fallen human being behind it. It\u2019s easy to be cowed and made defensive by the stories of success. The stronger mind is less like a sibling rival, and more like a tender parent.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Fran\u00e7ois de La Rochefoucauld","painting_name":"Maxims","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411728834La_Rochefoucauld_-_Maxims.jpg","stub":"im-envious-of-my-rival","order":18,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411728834La_Rochefoucauld_-_Maxims.jpg"},{"id":16,"category_id":4,"name":"I got rejected ","description":"Getting rejected for a job can be crushing. You open the email, with that key word \u2018unfortunately\u2019, and soon discover that your inner life has collapsed. You sit alone, in front of your computer, feeling very much alone in the universe, a few steps closer to mediocrity, death, and your eventual oblivion. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>The Death of Ivan Ilyich<\/i> takes us into the life of Ivan, who has just had the same experience: he gets rejected for a job at the St Petersburg Courts of Justice. The rejection is immensely painful. Nevertheless, Ivan does fight back and after a while lands himself another job with an equally respectable salary. It is a great relief; it looks as though Ivan has been saved. The point of the story, however, is that bigger things very quickly take over. Ivan develops a pain in his side which stops him being able to work. The doctors have no idea what it is. Ivan gets depressed. He lies in bed while his relatives visit, chatting, smiling, all ignoring the increasingly obvious fact that he will soon be dead.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIvan tosses around, slowly dying, and realises that almost all his life has been spent on career objectives. Each year after childhood he moved further and further away from everything he once enjoyed. Now, impotently, he wishes he\u2019d had more more adventurous conversations with his wife; that he\u2019d paid more attention to beauty; that he\u2019d had more fun. His chances are over now. Altogether it\u2019s a pitiful snapshot of someone who has largely wasted his life. But Tolstoy\u2019s intention is to help us, by showing us this situation in detail \u2013 in advance. To warn us that we, by allowing ourselves to to be caught up in the minor disasters, might miss the major one: not getting perspective on life until it is too late to do so. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Leo Tolstoy","painting_name":"The Death of Ivan Ilyich","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411727203Tolstoy_-_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich.jpg","stub":"i-got-rejected","order":19,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411727203Tolstoy_-_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich.jpg"},{"id":19,"category_id":4,"name":"I worry about money","description":"Money is a perfect magnet for our fantasies. As a unit in a system, money is a medium of exchange. But it is everything we attach to money in our minds that gives our personal money worries their diversity. Money, for us, might mean salvation. It might mean \u2018what my parents never did for me\u2019. It might mean revenge.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nTo get a good relationship with money we need to strip back all our background fantasies and ideas around money, and examine them. The starting point is to write down a few random words you associate with money. Perhaps you think of: \u2018weapons\u2019, \u2018glitter\u2019, \u2018house\u2019, and \u2018shut up\u2019, for example. The next task is to meditate on why these words came to mind. Perhaps if you think about the phrase \u2018shut up\u2019, you realise it takes you back to an experience you had with your family, visiting an expensive house. As you were looking around you asked your parents why their home was so much nicer than yours \u2013 and this was the response you remember getting. Whether this memory symbolises your feelings, or helped to form them, it\u2019s a hint that you tend to feel that expensive things are a little dangerous. It is one piece of the puzzle.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat are the key episodes in your private history with money? When did you feel most embarrassed around money? How did you feel about the people who were around you in that moment? Connect these answers to your current worries. What kind of role are you hoping that money will play in solving your problems? How magical or realistic are your thoughts around money?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe tend to think that we don\u2019t have any particularly weird ideas around money. We should resist this thought. Better to think \u2018I probably have some pretty strange ideas and ways of relating to money, even if I\u2019m not quite sure what these are yet\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"John Armstrong ","painting_name":"How to Worry Less About Money","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411727857Armstrong_-_How_to_Worry_Less_About_Money.jpg","stub":"i-worry-about-money","order":20,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411727857Armstrong_-_How_to_Worry_Less_About_Money.jpg"},{"id":20,"category_id":4,"name":"Capitalism is dull","description":"The work right in front of us can seem boring, but we often feel as well that the whole global economy (skyscrapers, warehouses...) is irredeemably dull. One remedy, proposed in <i>The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work<\/i>, is to look at the world of work with more imagination. For a start we should remember how strange our modern rituals are. What would a pilgrim from the 13th century make of walking into the foyer of one of our skyscrapers, like the London HQ of Deloitte? Accountants used to work alone, quartered in dingy back rooms, doing maths by candlelight. Now they own the greatest temple in the heart of the city. We serve in that temple like an altar boy might have served in Chartres Cathedral in 1250 AD, our preparation of the Powerpoint for our boss like the setting up of the Ciborium and the Communion Cup; the vestments we put on each day equivalent to the black Cassock and the lace Surplice. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nDeloitte\u2019s Powerpoints help guide institutions like the Sainsbury logistics centre, off the M25 in Essex, from where thousands of trucks go out each night to restock shelves across the country, with chicken drumsticks, red jelly, chocolate biscuits, strawberries. Our ancestors might have delighted in a handful of berries discovered in a bush, viewing them as a gift from God, but we became modern when we gave up awaiting gifts and sought to make everything widely available. In early December, twelve thousand strawberries wait here in darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, thanks to aeronautical engineers, assistant packing supply coordinators and accountants. Strawberries come from Israel in midwinter, Morocco in February, Holland in early summer, England in August and San Diego for Christmas, all within 96 hours before they start to mould. An improbable number of grown-ups have been forced to subordinate their natural laziness and wandering libidos in order to move pallets across sheds, look at spreadsheets and wait in lorries, all for the sensitivities of a soft plump fruit.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nCapitalism only seems dull because we are not in the habit of looking at it with sufficient imagination. Yes, we are one cog in a machine. But it\u2019s an intriguing machine, with its own strange priorities, grandeur, and often, its own peculiar beauty.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411728065De_Botton_-_The_Pleasures_and_Sorrows_of_Work.jpg","stub":"capitalism-is-dull","order":21,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411728065De_Botton_-_The_Pleasures_and_Sorrows_of_Work.jpg"},{"id":21,"category_id":4,"name":"I went into business with a friend... we\u2019re not friends anymore","description":"We\u2019re often frustrated and disappointed with the people we thought were our friends. Perhaps after an attempt at joint work, which didn\u2019t go well, you decide the whole relationship isn\u2019t worth the effort. How did you not see that, in addition to being a fun person to hang out with, this person is also constitutionally anxious, subtly vindictive, and deluded?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAristotle thinks we need to differentiate between different kinds of friendships. He distinguishes three kinds. Let\u2019s say you meet someone, and get talking. It turns out this person works in the same field as you do. So you exchange numbers. This is a friendship based on utility: you do things for each other because there is some gain in it for either party. Now imagine a second scenario: you\u2019re at a bar. You see someone attractive and chat to them. You like each other and end up having sex in hotels in foreign cities over the following months. This, Aristotle would say, is friendship based on pleasure \u2013 a category which also covers friendships based on doing fun things together (most friendships). The third kind of friendship is characterised by \u2018virtues\u2019. This is the kind of friendship we tend to idealise, where we are with the other person because we get pleasure from them, but also more than that: because they are inspiring. Not only are they helpful and forgiving. They are prudent, resilient, flexible. They give careful advice. This is the life-long friend, or the business partner who is still a true friend twenty years on.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe best type doesn\u2019t invalidate the other two. But we tend to want all of them to be the third, ideal, type. Aristotle shows us that simply to <i>like<\/i> someone doesn't mean you can do everything with them. We may need to be a bit harsher with ourselves about what can be realistically done with each relationship. Some friendships are great for having coffee and dinner, but working together would be a disaster. It\u2019s alright to say \u2018I don't think this is the kind of friendship for that\u2019, without feeling we are being hard-hearted.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Aristotle ","painting_name":"Ethics","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411739416Aristotle_-_Nichomachean_Ethics.jpg","stub":"i-went-into-business-with-a-friend-were-not-friends-anymore","order":22,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411739416Aristotle_-_Nichomachean_Ethics.jpg"},{"id":22,"category_id":4,"name":"I\u2019ve been disabled","description":"Harry Morgan, the hero of <i>To Have and Have Not<\/i>, loses an arm halfway through the book. His arm is perhaps more than normally important to him because his job is running a boat. Probably, we are not relying on our arms and legs for our income so directly, but the way he copes is helpful for any maddening debilitating loss. For all his grunting manner, aggression, and occasional harshness, Harry is a great hero for having perspective on life. He\u2019s concerned with what matters: doing his part to maintain a family, getting the job done, being a loyal friend, ensuring he doesn\u2019t make major tactical errors. He is a modern Stoic: he knows in his heart that life is full of disasters, therefore he panics less when they happen.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe hugely moving part of the book is his relationship with his wife, Marie. Living in a world of cynical businessmen and dissolute, vain people from all walks of life, at the core of the story are two fundamentally honourable and strong people who admire, respect, and love each other, even though she is a bit dumpy, and he has lost an arm. There are moments when other \u2013 stupid \u2013 characters judge them harshly from the outside. But each one appreciates the other\u2019s strength and goodness. Hemingway teaches a lesson via his admiration for the two characters: it is our own soul, or character, that matters. For his part, he is devoted to her. And she knows, despite all the injustice of the world, how lucky she is to possess that most valuable thing, which does not depend on outer circumstances, or the fate of a physical body, and which shows up the vanity of the rest of the world: a good man.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Ernst Hemingway ","painting_name":"To Have and Have Not","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1412351109Hemingway_-_To_Have_and_Have_Not.jpg","stub":"ive-been-disabled","order":23,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1412351109Hemingway_-_To_Have_and_Have_Not.jpg"},{"id":24,"category_id":4,"name":"I have so many people to catch up with!","description":"It is \u2013 secretly \u2013 fun to be popular. You go to a conference and it is thrilling having so many people to see: acquaintances, friends, business partners, people who keep sending you emails saying you should meet\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet it\u2019s also interesting to think what we might make of this on our deathbeds. When things are going well in life, we are spared the need to ask whether people want to see us for any real reason \u2013 for an authentic relationship \u2013 or just out of anxieties about their own status. But lying pressed between white hospital sheets, our right leg paralysed, the machine next to us delivering liquid, the nurse going by with a trolley, we might see more clearly the pointlessness of having sat through so many chattering, mindless inauthentic conversations with people we didn\u2019t even really like. We did it out of loneliness, we see now, but it never really solved our loneliness. It allowed us to suppress our loneliness \u2013 one other glossed-over cause of our dissatisfaction.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAs <i>Status Anxiety<\/i> proposes, making up vivid images of our own coming decay and death, if we do it often enough, can give us the courage we need. Flirtations with death are therapy for our inability to prioritise. There may be no better way of clearing our diary of engagements than asking which among them would make the trip to our hospital bed.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"Status Anxiety","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411728949De_Botton_-_Status_Anxiety.jpg","stub":"i-have-so-many-people-to-catch-up-with","order":24,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411728949De_Botton_-_Status_Anxiety.jpg"},{"id":25,"category_id":4,"name":"I feel I will never achieve my dreams","description":"You might have worked for years holding onto the hope that success \u2013 graduation, promotion, a profitable business \u2013 will make it all worthwhile. And then a day dawns when you realise this will never happen. Life will have to go on without those dreams. <i>Middlemarch<\/i> is the novel we need to encounter at this point, to broaden our perspective again and remind us what is great. Eliot takes us on an intelligent and wise investigation into our longing for great things, and fruitful ways to cope with thwarted hopes. The novel traces how various people can be equipped to deal with adjustments to their hopes for their own lives, when these must occur.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOne of the most admirable characters in the novel, Mr Garth, is let down by his business partner. His consequent debts meant that his family loses their savings. Mrs Garth learns that she must give up her son\u2019s premium \u2013 the money she has saved for years for his education \u2013 in order to pay off the debt. And the Garths are a poor family anyway. Yet the two of them are both mild and decent, more interested in recovering from remorse than blaming anyone bitterly \u2013 and in getting on with the good things in life. They cope with their misfortune with persistent goodwill through the difficult times. They live a strong, quiet existence, which is hugely admirable. They know that self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe often feel that the dreams we are, or were, chasing are what held life together. But that may not even be true. Our fantasies may have looked great, but only because they hung so wonderfully in the air. Eliot is hugely sympathetic to the pains and struggles we all face, and what it is like to hold heroic hopes. But she wants to shift our attention to where value is really located in life. Not primarily in the scale of our actions (although it is heroic to have great ambitions), but in the fineness of our natures; even if, in our lives as we are forced to lead them, our natures spend themselves in channels given no glamorous name in this world.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"George Eliot ","painting_name":"Middlemarch","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411739947Eliot_-_Middlemarch.jpg","stub":"i-feel-i-will-never-achieve-my-dreams","order":25,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411739947Eliot_-_Middlemarch.jpg"},{"id":26,"category_id":4,"name":"What is my calling?","description":"Some of us still hold onto the idea of a calling, the original thought being that God will come and tell us what we should be doing. We might feel as though we have a calling, but that it is lying around somewhere \u2013 we haven\u2019t yet found it. Or get anxious that we don't know what to do, in order to find it. Where does one start? <i>What Should I Do with My Life?<\/i> looks at some of the meandering paths people have taken before redirecting their lives. One person, Debbie Brient, wanted to get out of a career in marketing. She took a year off, had a great time camping in deserts, and ended up, sadly, back in her job. Three years later she took another year off. She camped more, and kept a journal. When she eventually decided to quit her job and move to Texas to work for the Nature Conservancy, she could trace out how her meandering made sense. She didn\u2019t suddenly discover a desire to conserve land; she had always had this desire. It was just lying around in a part of her mind disconnected from work. It took her a long time to take the desire seriously (it so happened that the very place \u2013 the desert \u2013 she had chosen to take time off to go and think, held the clue).<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe myth is that an epiphany tells us something completely new. It is, rather, a hard-won moment of clarity about the things with which we are <i>already <\/i> engaged; the problems we are already a confused victim of and might be called to devote our lives to help to solve; the things we already love, and have been seeking, just not giving the correct names or taking seriously enough. The pieces of our calling are lying around, not often filed under the category of \u2018work\u2019, but part of our lives, hidden in off-hand comments and recurring themes; stories we have already half-consciously half-written, more exciting than our current official narrative \u2013 which we might decide to spend the rest of our lives completing.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Po Bronson ","painting_name":"What Should I Do with My Life?","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411729111Bronson_-_What_Should_I_Do_With_My_Life.jpg","stub":"what-is-my-calling","order":26,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411729111Bronson_-_What_Should_I_Do_With_My_Life.jpg"}],"self":[{"id":27,"category_id":1,"name":"I lack self-confidence","description":"From time to time we all feel inadequate about ourselves and our endeavours. Nietzsche knew this very well; he was acutely aware of the crippling effects of low self-esteem. His books were frequently slated by reviewers and his supporters were few. He would not, however, let himself be dragged down by these circumstances, but composed an antidote in the form of an autobiography, <i>Ecce Homo<\/i> (\u2018Behold, The Man\u2019). It is an extraordinary exercise in how to buoy up one\u2019s self-confidence without becoming puffed up. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe procedure of <i>Ecce Homo<\/i> is simple: examine your life dispassionately. This is a difficult thing to do. Either we remember only the good bits and so develop an inflated, unrealistic sense of our own abilities, or we remember only the bad incidents and become ever more morose. Nietzsche focuses attention in surprising places. He is proud of the fact that he moved from Germany to Italy because the weather is better there. Normally we don\u2019t see that as an achievement, but he sees that it was a big thing for him to realise that rain and cloudy days got him down and to do something about it. He is proud of the music he likes (Rossini, Chopin) even though these were hardly unusual preferences at the time. He likes that he has worked out who his favourite writers are: Montaigne and Moli\u00e8re. He has stopped drinking beer; he has lightened his diet. He is ready to chalk up as successes things which are really good in his life, even though they may not look particularly impressive to anyone else. All this could sound trivial, but Nietzsche has latched onto a real problem. For decent, sensitive people it can be remarkably hard to appreciate oneself. And this difficulty undermines self-confidence. We find it hard to form a just opinion of our own merits. We are so used to the problem of people having too high an opinion of themselves that we naturally forget the reverse (but for many people very real) difficulty of not thinking well enough of oneself. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo often self-confidence is dependent on the basic, but for good people, elusive premise: I\u2019m fine as I am. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Friedrich Nietzsche ","painting_name":"Ecce Homo","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740140Nietzsche_-_Ecce_Homo.jpg","stub":"i-lack-self-confidence","order":27,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740140Nietzsche_-_Ecce_Homo.jpg"},{"id":28,"category_id":1,"name":"I don\u2019t have enough fun","description":"Nicholas is a French school boy; he\u2019s not much good at arithmetic and he\u2019s the smallest in his class, but he knows how to have fun. Sometimes this involves being what adults might think of as naughty. Being naughty is an art. It doesn\u2019t mean being bad \u2013 in the sense of setting out to harm other people or do them down. It just means being more confident about what other people can actually cope with. Nicholas gets water all over the floor, having staged a naval battle in the bath. It is vexing for the adults who have to make sure it all gets mopped up. But instinctively Nicholas realises this is not the end of the world. The grown ups will get cross for five minutes, but he grasps that even they know nothing really bad has happened. His rather prim friend Cuthbert worries about upsetting his parents. But Cuthbert in fact underestimates the capacity of other people to cope with minor inconveniences. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nNicholas is not terribly curious, or insightful, about what other people expect him to do. He doesn\u2019t have ill-will towards his teachers or parents. He just doesn\u2019t go about wondering what they think of him or what he needs to do in order to win and keep their favour. Deep down Nicholas knows that he\u2019ll be OK even if he breaks a few rules. And this is also true in our own lives. People will get cross, but we won't get sent to prison. Sometimes one needs to ask oneself \u2018what\u2019s the worst that can happen?\u2019 and realise that one will surely survive being shouted at or criticised. In other words, Nicholas has an accurate sense of proportion. Others will fume and fuss but, truly, they are exaggerating the danger. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA related trick Nicholas pulls off \u2013 which greatly enhances his ability to have fun \u2013 is selective attention. On one occasion he goes with his friends to play mini-golf. All around him other people are getting impatient, a wild shot hits a car, the man in charge is getting frantic. But Nicholas doesn\u2019t worry. He loves the game and being with his gang. He knows what is important and what doesn\u2019t really matter.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Goscinny and Semp\u00e9","painting_name":"Nicholas","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740304Goscinny_&_Sempe_-_Nicholas.jpg","stub":"i-dont-have-enough-fun","order":28,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740304Goscinny_&_Sempe_-_Nicholas.jpg"},{"id":39,"category_id":1,"name":"I don\u2019t feel confident enough about sex","description":"The main character of Philip Roth\u2019s novella <i>The Dying Animal<\/i> is sixty-two years old and has an affair with a beautiful twenty-four-year-old girl who he teaches at university in New York. He is utterly up front with himself about why he desires her: she has a gorgeous body. She dresses with discretion (but with a sweet white blouse showing), her manner of approaching life and holding herself is self-possessed, even aristocratic. She adores his position as a teacher of culture. What he wants to do is have sex with her, and he does. And throughout everything he confesses to you, the reader, just what is going on in his mind. There is a lot of chit chat before they get to sleep together, about painting and music and so on \u2013 he says \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t make any difference to the underlying desire and purpose.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHis monologue can be liberating because he is unafraid of the strength of his own desire. He is not a callous person. At other points in the book they share some very tender moments, in the face of death. He has many sides \u2013 he is fascinated by piano music. He also really, really wants to have sex, and is unafraid of making the moves. His robustness can be a useful corrective to an inward fear of ourselves.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Philip Roth ","painting_name":"The Dying Animal","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740394Roth_-_Dying_Animal.jpg","stub":"i-dont-feel-confident-enough-about-sex","order":29,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740394Roth_-_Dying_Animal.jpg"},{"id":37,"category_id":1,"name":"My life is a collection of fragments \u2013 and then I am going to die","description":"You are always doubting yourself, comparing your merits to other people\u2019s and seeking that perfect self which, attractively packaged, would interview well for a glossy magazine. Often you feel you will never be impressive but always as you are, apparently a chaotic collection of fragmented interests and desires.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>A Scattering<\/i> by Christopher Reid consoles us for these worries. It is a collection of poems written around the death of Reid\u2019s wife. The title refers to the practice of elephants in their graveyards who rearrange the bones of their dead with their trunks. Reid is like the elephant: his poetry is a somewhat haphazard rearrangement of bones \u2013 remnants of things past. He scatters his memories into \u2018new patterns of hope\u2019, but he is never afraid to live with the reality that they have come to him and remain with him as fragments and moments. As we see a wife, a beloved, in snatches of recollection, she comes alive as precisely the scattered impact she has had on him: vital, necessary, intense and yet always with more to disclose. So are we to each other: not perfect transparent selves or neatly packaged entities, but collections of actions, impressions and loves. Our own full self remains invisible to our own limited vision. We nonetheless have the great and weighty power of touching others with the scattered sparks of our existence, and live on in the light so kindled.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Christopher Reid ","painting_name":"A Scattering","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740437Reid_-_A_Scattering.jpg","stub":"my-life-is-like-a-collection-of-fragments-and-then-i-am-going-to-die","order":30,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740437Reid_-_A_Scattering.jpg"},{"id":40,"category_id":1,"name":"Buried anger","description":"You might report quite proudly that there was not much anger in your family. There were, of course, moments \u2013 one or two frightening cases stick in your mind \u2013 but they were unnerving exceptions. Anger is terrifying; we were lucky to have avoided it. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOr, were we so lucky? Perhaps something else, more interesting, was going on in our family. As John Cleese and his therapist explain, all families get in the habit of putting certain emotions in the background. Having not much anger around is not a difficult achievement, nor is it necessarily a good one. Our parents get in the habit of suppressing anger, and the problems and desires that might lead to anger. We pick this up as a child \u2013 we see how the emotion upsets our parents. Slowly we get the message that it\u2019s taboo. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIdeally we learn to cope well with anger: to express it within reason, rather than learning to panic and push it away. For pushing a strong feeling away eventually has the effect of hiding it even from our own attention, within our own minds. Our little conscious beam of attention doesn\u2019t even know that the rest of our brain is feeling anger. Which doesn\u2019t stop us acting out the anger, often in more subtle, less reasonable \u2013 or, occasionally, explosive \u2013 ways.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nFar better the stereotype Italian family, who are not frightened by anger but treat it as a normal event. Or the East Timorese mother, who will shout at the bus driver over the ticket price, and 20 seconds later have a nice chat with him. Anger is often necessary, in standing up for ourselves, in bringing key problems to the fore. Sometimes, the striking absence of a common emotion is a sign that after all, one\u2019s family didn\u2019t manage it particularly wisely.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Robin Skynner & John Cleese ","painting_name":"Families and How to Survive Them","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1412354042Cleese_&_Skynner_-_Families_and_How_to_Survive_Them.jpg","stub":"my-parents-never-got-angry-at-each-other","order":31,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1412354042Cleese_&_Skynner_-_Families_and_How_to_Survive_Them.jpg"},{"id":31,"category_id":1,"name":"This is the end of my tether","description":"The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was familiar with feeling very worn down. Coming in to middle age, he is on campaign, extending the Roman Empire in Macedonia. Things are going well, but still he has to deal with pettiness from his staff, and his loneliness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe tells himself not to care that his generals do not sympathise with him. Most people are stupid, he writes to himself; don\u2019t expect too much. Curled up in his tent at night on a hessian sack, writing by candlelight, he invents some images to keep in mind. Think of the ideal personality like a spring of water bubbling up from the ground, he writes. Yes, people will throw dirt in, but that\u2019s fine \u2013 it just gets washed away. And the spring keeps bubbling up, fresh as ever.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHis goal is to get a perpetual spring inside himself. To be fresh and strong when surrounded by muck.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Marcus Aurelius ","painting_name":"Meditations","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740470Aurelius_-_Meditations.jpg","stub":"this-is-the-end-of-my-tether","order":32,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740470Aurelius_-_Meditations.jpg"},{"id":30,"category_id":1,"name":"Timid habits","description":"You would like your partner to pick their clothes up off the floor. Yet this is surprisingly difficult to ask. For they would resent you. Their quietness would mean they hate you; the request would play into the narrative of you being too fussy; the theme of \u2018clothes on the floor\u2019 would become a constant sticking point in your relationship. Better just to leave it then. Until you explode with rage.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>They F*** You Up<\/i> looks at how our emotional blocks often have their roots in childhood. Perhaps, for instance, you had a mother who often felt exasperated and overwhelmed. So there were many moments growing up \u2013 moments which got imprinted on your brain \u2013 where you asked for something and were made to feel that you were being too demanding. The impressions which, for one reason or another, shape us, generate a \u2018script\u2019 in our mind. A script is a set of expectations stored in the brain which is used automatically to handle situations which trigger your well-rehearsed patterns. For example, your early experiences with your mother may have generated the following, semi-conscious script: \u2018whenever I ask for things, or nudge people, I risk causing them to growl, or snap, or become resentful, or break down \u2013 things get dangerous\u2019. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe then apply this script (which derives from a four-year-old\u2019s attempt to interpret the world) to new situations (like asking your partner to put their clothes away). The problem is, the new situation may be completely different \u2013 even if it has a few similar surface features. In this case, we might need to give ourselves permission to be pushier, as a corrective to our personal bias. \u2018It\u2019s fine for me to be a bit pushier \u2013 people are tougher than I tend to think\u2019. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Oliver James ","painting_name":"They F*** You Up","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411943352James_-_They_F_You_Up.jpg","stub":"asking-for-things-can-be-surprisingly-fraught","order":33,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411943352James_-_They_F_You_Up.jpg"},{"id":32,"category_id":1,"name":"I had this bizarre thought","description":"On some level you feel weirder than the people around you. But it\u2019s often a confusing experience, for them and for you, to blurt out your weirder thoughts. Maybe you went to a beach with some friends but it felt, completely unexpectedly, on a sunny day, rather spooky. Or you told someone that you are \u2013 strangely \u2013 always reminded of pancakes whenever you go to pat the neighbours\u2019 dog. People tend to respond to such comments with a blank stare. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSebald\u2019s book is like a good companion who loves, and is entertained by and completely at ease with, the dreamier, more random side to ourselves. He is unafraid to follow the connections which his mind makes in the course of thinking, and to probe what they are really about. For instance he starts talking about how he was wandering through the Suffolk countryside and got lost, and wandered around for hours on the heath, which then leads him on to a dream he had about this experience: he sees from above that he is lost in a maze, which it turns out is actually a map of his own brain. He then muses on his emotions around being lost.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe voice that comes through has a dreamy, dissociated quality. It helps rehabilitate the dreamy, dissociated side to ourselves; it gives us confidence to let this side come to the fore in our own lives. The writer is at home enough with his wandering, slightly crazy mind to use a random thought or a coincidence as a starting point for a conversation \u2013 and to bring you along.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe get in the habit of hiding the more intuitive, disorganised part of our minds. Sebald encourages us to branch out into being a bit random ourselves. And, if we can\u2019t be this way entirely with the friends we have, we can do it with at least two good allies: <i>The Rings of Saturn<\/i> and a cup of tea.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"W.G. Sebald ","painting_name":"The Rings of Saturn","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740651Sebald_-_Rings_of_Saturn.jpg","stub":"i-had-this-bizarre-thought-but-i-couldnt-tell-anyone","order":34,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740651Sebald_-_Rings_of_Saturn.jpg"},{"id":38,"category_id":1,"name":"I play up too much to expectations","description":"We have a hand in creating the expectations which mould us. We may have come to think of ourselves as good at maths, for example; maths is \u2018what we do\u2019. This then becomes who we are: we become the \u2018maths guy\u2019, and through subtle prompts and responses, help create a web of expectations for ourselves. Or, perhaps, we get good at a particular style of banter and irreverence, which our friends enjoy, and so this becomes the prominent part of ourselves \u2013 the role we feel compelled to live up to at each social gathering. Other parts \u2013 our passionate, earnest side \u2013 stay in the background. Yet behind every performance, all of us contain multitudes; we just often don\u2019t bring our other sides into play.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBeing moulded by expectations goes even deeper. Not only do we hold things back because they don\u2019t fit socially (which is, of course, often the wise thing to do); the problem is that we push aspects of ourselves aside so habitually that we can\u2019t even bring those parts of ourselves into our own consciousness. We tell <i>ourselves<\/i> too narrow a story about our own identity. For we are not just a mathematician who banters. We have anxieties about death. We have a weird attraction to dark eyebrows. We long for tenderness...<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is natural to try to avoid social danger by attempting to morph into everyone\u2019s expectations. Saying, politely, what is on your mind, or in the back of your mind \u2013 taking a stand, becoming something (and thus not everything to everyone) threatens people. They may not like it. For they had other ideas about who you are.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"D.W. Winnicott ","painting_name":"Home Is Where We Start From","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411742538Winnicott_-_Home_is_Where_We_Start_From.jpg","stub":"i-play-up-too-much-to-expectations","order":35,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411742538Winnicott_-_Home_is_Where_We_Start_From.jpg"},{"id":33,"category_id":1,"name":"Directionlessness","description":"There are terrible times when we have no idea what the right path for us could be. We sense the danger of making fatal choices. We feel that opportunities have been wasted. We\u2019ve messed up too much already; we\u2019re lost at this point in life and somewhat bewildered.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis grim situation is powerfully evoked at the start of Dante\u2019s <i>Divine Comedy<\/i>, the <i>Inferno<\/i>. Dante finds himself in a dark wood, his heart full of fear, a feeling \u2018as bitter as death\u2019. He tries to pull himself together and reach a better place: the sunny heights. But he is prevented by ravenous wolf, loaded with every craving: his own desperation for sex, drink; his envy, laziness, all his chaotic impulses drag him back to despair. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is the starting point for Dante\u2019s exploration of himself and the universe. He\u2019s going to take us with him on a huge moral journey of discovery. He\u2019s going to show us how love is the cure. But he understands that the lesson won\u2019t work unless we know that he has been just as confused and miserable as we sometimes are. Instead of telling us to cheer up, he admits, as a way of consoling us, that life can be dreadful. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOver the long course of the poem, Dante will eventually rediscover his capacity to love. He will get his thoughts in order. He will find again his sense of purpose in life. He will stop being utterly maddened by the stupidity of the world and the cruelty and greed he is so conscious of in others and in himself. He will cope. But we couldn\u2019t trust him on this journey of recovery if we didn\u2019t know that he, too, had been desperate. In the dark wood, he is with us.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Dante Alighieri ","painting_name":"The Divine Comedy","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411740708Dante_-_Divine_Comedy.jpg","stub":"i-dont-know-what-direction-my-life-should-take","order":36,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411740708Dante_-_Divine_Comedy.jpg"},{"id":29,"category_id":1,"name":"I worry my desires are too strange","description":"In everyday life, when I\u2019m out with people, when I\u2019m working, I\u2019m normal. As normal as the next person. But when I\u2019m on my own, or when I\u2019m making love, my tastes seem to change. I want things that are weird, that I would never want otherwise. I\u2019m far too embarrassed to tell my partner about what I\u2019d like them to do, but I still can\u2019t help feeling disgusted with myself. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis feeling, writes Freud, is perfectly normal. But it is also regrettable. For even though most of us feel ashamed of our sexual desires, these desires are in themselves not abnormal. When we experience sex as a powerful and often strange force within us, the contrast between it and everyday life becomes stark enough that we infer that our true tastes (and sexual histories) are so deviant that we, almost without noticing, suppress them, from both ourselves and from other people. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat Freud discovered when working with his patients was that, in truth, everybody is equally weird in this regard. Abnormally behaved people have sexual fantasies, but so do normally behaved ones (they just don\u2019t act on them). Even children have sexual urges. None of us are normal sexually, because the social norm itself is based not on human nature, but on an idea of what human nature ought to be. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>Three Essays on Sexuality<\/i> shows us that we are universally deviant. This should not make us distraught, but encourage us to be more intrepid about articulating our actual desires. We might try to say what we really want in the bedroom, and, rather than being ashamed, just be curious as to our partner\u2019s response. We will probably find that they too have surprising suggestions we could never have dreamt of. We might end up excited rather than disgusted.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Sigmund Freud ","painting_name":"Three Essays on Sexuality","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1412254976Freud_-_Reader.jpg","stub":"i-worry-my-desires-are-too-strange","order":37,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1412254976Freud_-_Reader.jpg"},{"id":35,"category_id":1,"name":"Beauty is important, but people will say I\u2019m being superficial","description":"Beauty can sometimes seem like the only thing worth living for \u2013 those moments when everything comes together, when things <i>work<\/i>. Like the beauty of a dance, or the beauty of tenderness and strength meeting something destructive: containing it, resolving it. And yet, we tend to think of beautiful things as a bit mysterious in their appeal to us, and (as we imagine other people will say): not terribly important. <i>The Secret Power of Beauty<\/i> asks the question: why is it that we <i>like<\/i> beautiful things at all? An answer, first investigated by Plato, is that we recognise in them a part of \u2018the good\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere are lots of good things we aspire to be: kind, gentle, harmonious, balanced, peaceful, strong, dignified. These are good qualities in people. But they are also qualities in objects. We get moved and excited when we find in objects the qualities we need but are missing in our lives. Beautiful objects therefore have a really important function. They invite us to evolve in their direction, to become as they are. Beauty can educate our souls.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt follows that ugliness is a serious matter too, for it parades dangerous and damaged characteristics in front of us. It encourages us to be like it: harsh, chaotic, brash. It makes it that much harder to be wise, kind, and calm.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"John Armstrong","painting_name":"The Secret Power of Beauty","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411742641Armstrong_-_Secret_Power_of_Beauty.jpg","stub":"beauty-feels-important-but-people-will-say-im-being-superficial","order":38,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411742641Armstrong_-_Secret_Power_of_Beauty.jpg"},{"id":36,"category_id":1,"name":"Lack of feeling","description":"On some occasions it is bizarre to discover that you don\u2019t feel very much. Perhaps you find out that someone you know is ill and in hospital. You respond in the right way, say the right things, but underneath it all, you feel\u2026  worryingly little. What\u2019s going on?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOccasionally when we are pushed into mental territory where we don\u2019t want to go \u2013 feeling too angry, sad, or feeling any strong upsetting emotion \u2013 our mind shuts this off and goes blank. Yet strangely, blankness does not necessarily mean that we are feeling nothing. Our brain might indeed be generating quite intense feelings; we are just not conscious of these feelings. Grief can remain in the background and only later come through \u2013 as can anger, or anxiety, or sexual desire... Going blank, or dissociating, is not an act of will; it is an automatic habit of scrambling certain feelings which might be connected with something too dangerous and highly charged. In <i>Couch Fiction<\/i>, a comic strip tale of a barrister who tries out psychotherapy, the main character discovers one morning that the window of his car has been smashed. He looks at the smashed window and feels nothing. He concludes: I coped so well! Nevertheless it turns out, on reflection, that he is actually angry. The problem is that over many years he has learnt that feeling too angry is dangerous. There are processes suppressing his anger before it can even reach his conscious mind.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nGetting a better relationship between our conscious and unconscious is a big task. The starting point is realising that the stories we tell about our own minds are not necessarily accurate.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Philippa Perry ","painting_name":"Couch Fiction","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411742788Perry_-_Couch_Fiction.jpg","stub":"im-supposed-to-feel-grief-or-anger-but-i-feel-nothing","order":39,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411742788Perry_-_Couch_Fiction.jpg"},{"id":34,"category_id":1,"name":"I\u2019m struggling on my own ","description":"Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen\u2019s <i>Mansfield Park<\/i>, has been in love with Edmund since childhood. Living with her wealthy cousins she doesn\u2019t shine; she\u2019s not outwardly impressive. In her lonely life amongst more fashionable and willful people Edmund has been the only person who has appreciated her quiet, but very real, merits. Fanny is deeply loyal, generous, with tremendous integrity \u2013 she is extremely practical and hard working and in another era might have been very good at running a small business. Edmund alone can see her as she is. She loves him. But Edmund doesn\u2019t think of Fanny as someone he could possibly marry. He\u2019s much more drawn to elegant, seductive women. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThen a rich young man comes along, Henry, and amuses himself by trying to seduce Fanny. In fact he gets charmed by her and makes her an offer of marriage. Fanny loathes Henry, but he is wealthy, popular and handsome and everyone thinks its a great opportunity for uninteresting little Fanny. A powerful relative and even the kindly Edmund all think she is being ungrateful and selfish to refuse the rich catch. Everyone is against her. But Fanny is sure she is right to reject Henry Crawford. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn the end Henry gets impatient. He gives up and runs off with a married woman \u2013 an unpardonable crime. At this point it becomes obvious to everyone that Henry has a spoilt nature and that Fanny was right all along to distrust him. Those who had tried to bully her into marriage with him are suitably chastened. As her final reward, Jane Austen gives Fanny the lovely Edmund as a husband. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBecause <i>Mansfield Park<\/i> is a novel, Jane Austen can engineer a morally satisfying ending. Fanny stood alone and embattled for many chapters, but all turned out well for her. But it\u2019s not the ending, perhaps, that really matters here. What is moving, and helpful, is that we can be with Fanny during the time when she is under siege from all quarters, when no one is on her side. During all that period, there is one person who understands and who loves Fanny, and that is the author. Jane Austen was on her side. And this author \u2013 among the most admired and distinguished \u2013 is with us too, is on our side when we are like Fanny. She knows and wants to comfort us in the only way she can. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Jane Austen","painting_name":"Mansfield Park","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411742861Austen_-_Mansfield_Park.jpg","stub":"im-struggling-on-my-own","order":40,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411742861Austen_-_Mansfield_Park.jpg"}],"politics":[{"id":41,"category_id":6,"name":"Pop culture depresses me","description":"You\u2019re at the bus stop next to a poster for the next blockbuster. This summer, it\u2019s going to be the end of the world: New York will be blown up, possibly even flooded, and only one man can save it \u2013 plus his girlfriend. You\u2019ve seen it all before. It\u2019s all so trite, predictable \u2013 and, for millions of people, the most exciting thing they will do this weekend. You get depressed.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBarthes is entirely sympathetic to how one might be bored and maddened by the pop culture of one\u2019s country. But he wants to teach us a better way of reacting to it. In <i>Mythologies<\/i> for example he buys a ticket to a professional wrestling match \u2013 something which seems as moronic as an action blockbuster. However, he looks at the event as part of the collective life of the nation, like the amphitheatre was in ancient Athens. The wrestling stage is one way of publicly acting out our collective longing for justice. The audience responds indignantly to the provocations of the \u2018bad\u2019 wrestlers, and cheers for their vanquishers. They love it when foul play is punished \u2013 a longing we all know, but which we may not often be able or allowed to act on with quite the decisiveness of bashing somebody up.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBarthes\u2019 key psychological move is to resist wincing when he is faced with something populist. He pushes aside all the clever-sounding things he could say, and asks what it might be like to love this thing. We should ask this too, perhaps visiting a trashy pop concert or an evangelical Christian gathering: what is the appeal here? What might it be like to get excited by this? It is not simply hormones and cheap thrills. Big ideas on love, justice, heroism and virtue are tied up in the practices and products all around us. Barthes wants us to look expecting to find something interesting.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Roland Barthes ","painting_name":"Mythologies","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726957Barthes_-_Mythologies.jpg","stub":"pop-culture-depresses-me","order":41,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726957Barthes_-_Mythologies.jpg"},{"id":42,"category_id":6,"name":"I\u2019m too nice \u2013 people trample over me","description":"It sometimes feels that the only way to be in charge of other people is to be rough \u2013 that being decent leads to getting pushed down. In his children\u2019s story <i>Matilda<\/i>, Roald Dahl introduces us to Matilda\u2019s teacher, Miss Honey, who is very sweet but who has landed in a miserable position by being too yielding and timid. Miss Honey\u2019s bombastic aunt, Miss Trunchbull, has robbed her of her home and possessions, and has come to dominate her life. All Miss Honey has managed to do is escape to a tiny, semi-derelict cottage where she lives on bread and margarine, and although this simplicity suits her character, she is sorrowful under the injustice and her own sense of failure. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn the story, Matilda is a delightfully serious child prodigy with telekinetic powers \u2013 which she deploys to put everything right. Roald Dahl does not offer direct practical guidance. The reliable way to escape being downtrodden can\u2019t be an encounter with a child who has magical powers. But that\u2019s not Dahl\u2019s real message. What he\u2019s doing, instead, is shining a revealing light on mild, gentle characters. He reminds us \u2013 when we lose faith \u2013 that Miss Honey\u2019s problem is not at all that she is too nice. She is exactly the right degree of nice. It just happens that she has been bullied by someone who is mean and domineering. The solution is not to get less nice. It\u2019s to get more strategic and more competent. We must never think of the growth of these capacities as a way of being less kind or thoughtful or tender.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Roald Dahl ","painting_name":"Matilda","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726924Dahl_-_Matilda.jpg","stub":"im-too-nice-people-are-always-taking-advantage-of-me","order":42,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726924Dahl_-_Matilda.jpg"},{"id":50,"category_id":6,"name":"I hate politicians ","description":"Our image of powerful figures \u2013 most intimately our parents \u2013 doesn\u2019t tell us the back story. We don\u2019t get to see how the President worries in his room, can\u2019t sleep, doubts, feels lonely. Perhaps we shut our eyes to this for our psychological security: it is hard to take on board the feeling that the people looking after us, or who should be looking after us, might struggle and need help to do so.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>Henry V<\/i> takes us into the intimate life of a newly crowned English king in the process of growing up into the role. As a teenager he had lots of parties. Now we see him, surrounded by soldiers, talking about how cut off he is, forced to be Godlike when he would rather show weakness. What is more, he has to get the people around him to grow up. At one point he gives one of the most exciting speeches in the history of English literature \u2013 at the Battle of Agincourt \u2013 and this does bring out the better sides of those around him, for a couple of hours. But up to this point it\u2019s been gruelling, and he knows that, as the political head, everyone sees him as just a symbol: something to hate or cheer on.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s OK to feel angry, even enraged, at our politicians. We should own the feeling. After all we feel enraged at everyone sometimes, even those we love dearly. Also, we should remember that politicians are perfectly capable of surviving attacks we make on them \u2013 in that way they are, perhaps, stronger than us. What we often forget is that we are in the picture too, and that our leaders might need from us not just our opinion, but our maturity. The psychological move we have to make is to accept that we are part of a relationship with a human being, not a symbol, or a list of policies. That politicians might need <i>us<\/i> to grow up, if we are to get a better country.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Shakespeare ","painting_name":"Henry V","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726795Shakespeare_-_Henry_V.jpg","stub":"i-hate-politicians","order":43,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726795Shakespeare_-_Henry_V.jpg"},{"id":44,"category_id":6,"name":"Making a profit is a bad ambition","description":"It is odd that so many of the most successful commercial organisations in the world today deal only with limited and quite boring needs: phone companies, supermarkets, car manufacturers. We have come to associate making money with inane desires and exploitation. It is not surprising that at times the whole idea of seeking profit can feel disreputable. In the strangely titled <i>Unto this Last<\/i>, John Ruskin \u2013 the Victorian art critic, popular philosopher and social entrepreneur \u2013 advances the radical idea that profit can be deeply moral and made in the service of our most inspiring ambitions, although he\u2019s acutely aware that often it is not. True profit, he says, is about bringing things that are life-giving into the world, or assisting in some indirect way to do this.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe gives the example of a silversmith. If a silversmith makes ornaments for the sake of showing off, and which people buy for the sake of showing off, then he has added nothing to anyone\u2019s life. But if a silversmith makes ornaments which really do help us live a nicer life \u2013 which prompt us via everyday objects to be more cheerful or playful \u2013 then he deserves our money. Profit is just people being willing to pay you more than it cost you to make it. <i>Deserved<\/i> profit depends on what role exactly the thing you sell ends up playing in the customer\u2019s life. A modern example might be J.K. Rowling whose books have added a lot to the lives of millions of people, and for which she has been hugely rewarded. Whereas someone who sells <i>The Collected Works of Plato<\/i> may not, in fact, be doing much for the world because most people who buy the 1000-page book are so daunted by its size they never get around to learning anything concrete from it. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nObviously many ways that money is made at the moment are extremely far from Ruskin\u2019s ideal. <i>Unto This Last<\/i> is sketching an ideal that corrects both an indiscriminate drive for money, and a blanket dismissal of the whole idea of profit. It gives hope.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"John Ruskin","painting_name":"Unto This Last","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726871Ruskin_-_Unto_This_Last.jpg","stub":"making-a-profit-is-a-bad-ambition","order":44,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726871Ruskin_-_Unto_This_Last.jpg"},{"id":45,"category_id":6,"name":"Idealism","description":"How is humanity doing? How are we going in our search for happiness? Well, yesterday there was a punch up between football fans in Manchester, Barcelona, Milan, S\u00e3o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Today three journalists have chosen to review books which they think should be wiped off the face of the planet. There are some knifings, two religious wars, a massacre in a school and 126 politicians having affairs. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nFreud teaches us to be unsurprised about this general bleakness. The reason is that we are all constitutionally horrible. What is surprising, in fact, is that things aren\u2019t even worse. Rather than lament the bloodlust and greed of the world, we should instead celebrate so many people having kept the impulses to murder, assault and infidelity under control for such long periods of time. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIdealism can often be a danger, when we crash so devastatingly into the realisation of just how miserable things are. The idealism of early years can flip into cynicism later in life. Yet in the context of a civilised psychoanalytic essay, we can let ourselves down gently, and accept with calm rather than despair just how nasty we can all sometimes be.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nLooking closely at the darkness ingrained within us doesn\u2019t have to be the end of all hope. On the contrary, it might be the best starting point for building a more merciful society.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Sigmund Freud ","painting_name":"Civilization and Its Discontents","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726846Freud_-_Civilization_and_Its_Discontents.jpg","stub":"im-an-idealist","order":45,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726846Freud_-_Civilization_and_Its_Discontents.jpg"},{"id":46,"category_id":6,"name":"It doesn\u2019t matter what buildings look like","description":"It can be painful to start feeling sensitive to the objects around us. Receptivity brings new problems into our lives: rage and frustration and the feeling that a lot of people couldn\u2019t care less. But we need to pay attention to the buildings and objects around us because they impact us whether we ask them to or not. We don\u2019t always notice how much our moods and attitudes, our levels of hope or defensiveness, generosity or patience, calm or agitation, are prompted by different environments. Yet, for better or worse, we are different people in different places.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>The Architecture of Happiness<\/i> focuses on the way that what we find beautiful rebalances us. If we are anxious we may long for minimalism and gentle order. If we are timid we might secretly admire a bit of grandeur. This is why architecture is political. It is the material home for certain parts of human personality \u2013 for the kinds of people which a society fosters and honours and promotes. Architecture cannot, on its own, turn around a bad mood, let alone a bad relationship or character, but the construction of our rooms, and cities, can be like gently cradling arms for certain fragile and ignored parts of our psyches. Buildings can remind us of our saner, stronger, more organised sides. Or of the playful impulses within us. The crescents of Bath might, if we are already heading in that direction, bolster the sense of serenity needed to hold at bay a tendency to bitterness. The sensuous charm of Oscar Niemeyer\u2019s Villa da Canoas might bring hope to the faltering sex life of a marriage. Such places function like the ideal friend who can, in times of stress, ease you back to your own better nature. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"The Architecture of Happiness","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726835Botton_-_Architecture_of_Happiness.jpg","stub":"it-doesnt-matter-what-buildings-look-like","order":46,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726835Botton_-_Architecture_of_Happiness.jpg"},{"id":43,"category_id":6,"name":"I\u2019m sick of all this inequality ","description":"When Benjamin Disraeli wrote this book in the 1840s he wasn\u2019t yet Prime Minister of the UK \u2013 just a highly ambitious backbencher. In the novel he paints a picture of a country riven with massive inequalities: dukes and factory workers, rich industrialists and impoverished farm labourers, heartless apparatchiks and a brutalised underclass. The relationship between the have and the have-nots was at breaking point. The details might not be exactly the same, but the basic outlines of the portrait are familiar today. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn <i>Sybil<\/i>, Disraeli conducts a thought experiment: what would a society have to be like if it were to solve this crucial problem? He was horrified by the tendency of the fortunate few to become lazy, selfish and indifferent to the well-being of the majority. But he rules out from the start what is often thought to be the key move \u2013 he doesn\u2019t believe that inequality can be got rid of. He assumes that in some shape or form it is an inevitable consequence of freedom and ambition. It might even be founded on basic features of human nature. The pretty will always have an edge over the plain, the witty over the dull, the industrious over the lackadaisical, the strategic over those who drift. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe can tame inequality. But given that it cannot be eradicated, is there anything else we can do to make inequality less malignant? Rather than just berate the privileged, which has limited prospects as a reforming move \u2013 since people don\u2019t usually become kinder and more responsible just because we explain that we dislike them \u2013 Disraeli instead sets out to seduce the rich and powerful. The central idea of the book is that privilege is only justified by responsibility. The top levels of society had to be made to feel that it was their duty to protect the weak. He wanted to show this not as a burdensome, tedious duty to be grudgingly fulfilled, but as a glamorous, exciting new identity. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nDisraeli absorbed a crucial fact about motivation, which cynicism fatally forgets. If you want people to improve it\u2019s not enough to make them feel guilty. You have to make it feel attractive to be good. Which is a real problem; but one which doesn\u2019t depend on the eradication of inequality for its solution.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Benjamin Disraeli ","painting_name":"Sybil","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411721862Disraeli_-_Sybil.jpg","stub":"im-sick-of-all-this-inequality","order":47,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411721862Disraeli_-_Sybil.jpg"},{"id":47,"category_id":6,"name":"That is such a first-world problem ","description":"On top of our personal troubles \u2013 stupid boss, affair, idiot on the street, anxiety, loneliness, no community, what\u2019s the point anyway \u2013 we can add another layer of worry: we are embarrassed about having these sort of problems at all. It can be hard to find a sincere way to look into \u2018first world problems\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>An Intimate History of Humanity<\/i> does just that. It takes the tiny troubles of daily life and traces them back through history and across civilisations. Zeldin believes that the details of our small troubles are an entirely legitimate thing to ask about, and investigate in more detail, and search for help with.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe sometimes say \u2018but that is such a first world problem\u2019 as a way of stopping the conversation. Zeldin wants this to be a starting point. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Theodore Zeldin ","painting_name":"An Intimate History of Humanity","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726825Zeldin_-_Intimate_History_of_Humanity.jpg","stub":"that-is-such-a-first-world-problem","order":48,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726825Zeldin_-_Intimate_History_of_Humanity.jpg"},{"id":48,"category_id":6,"name":"Lack of ambition","description":"Most politics is about small adjustments which take up quite a lot of time. The Deputy Head of the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet\u2019s great achievement \u2013 the work of five years \u2013 might be having integrated the health and safety regulations across six state jurisdictions, for example. It doesn\u2019t sound like a great achievement. And, in a way, it isn\u2019t \u2013 although it took a lot of time. One can\u2019t help but wonder if there are possibilities for greater heroism. Yet epic things seem out of place: contrary to the rhetoric and the practical possibilities in societies today.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>The Communist Manifesto<\/i> is one example to the contrary. Karl Marx wrote it in 1848 with a group of people in a pub in London, when the communist movement was less a \u2018spectre haunting Europe\u2019 (as they put it) and in truth, at that point, barely a whisper in the air. Of course writing your own manifesto could make you a weirdo. But all that is required for a proper resurgence of idealism is to awaken the idealism in sensible people; to bring a serious constituency along with you. The <i>Manifesto<\/i> reminds us there is no reason this can\u2019t happen again \u2013 around the goals of building beautiful cities, spreading wisdom for how to live and die well, inventing the products and services to meet our deepest needs...<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe should read <i>The Communist Manifesto<\/i> to pick up its courage. One feels that the world is so enormous and tangled that it could never change. Trillions of dollars are moved about, mergers signed and drilling begun in undersea trenches, while we sit here in a little room. Marx and his friend Engels knew this feeling. And yet they had no doubt that they had something important to bring forth into the world. And that they were the ones who were going to give up their lives to do it. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Karl Marx","painting_name":"The Communist Manifesto","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726816Marx_-_Communist_Manifesto.jpg","stub":"politics-seems-tedious-and-not-about-grand-things","order":49,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726816Marx_-_Communist_Manifesto.jpg"},{"id":49,"category_id":6,"name":"Is there something deeply wrong with the economy? ","description":"Adam Smith\u2019s focus, in <i>The Wealth of Nations<\/i>, is on the person who needs the product. Imagine a man wants a pair of shoes, in Smith\u2019s day. He goes to the craft shoe maker who says: yes, I\u2019ll make you pair of shoes; it will take me a day. So you will have to pay for my upkeep for one day. Then specialisation comes along. Now twenty people are making 125 pairs of shoes a day, by dividing up the tasks. So the cost is one fifth. It is boring to work in the factory, but the man gets a pair of shoes. This for Smith was a big deal \u2013 he lived in a society where a lot of people didn\u2019t have shoes. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis approach was great for making bread, nails (for making your house), shoes \u2013 in a society which really was short of these things. The trouble is, we feel painfully today, there are now hundreds of millions of people who don\u2019t need any more shoes, or more cars. Or more phones, watches, yachts\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAdam Smith would probably agree with this. His point would be that we are just at the beginning of capitalism. We have worked out how to produce some fairly basic things. But there are many things which would be truly good for us, but which are not yet widely available because they are not yet cheap enough; only a few people have them: beautiful buildings, excellent childcare, relationship advice, stylish dance halls, serious career guidance, educative travel, wise dating services. The challenge is to turn these products and services from their sketchy beginnings now into the biggest and most attractive and serious employers in the world.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Adam Smith ","painting_name":"The Wealth of Nations ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726806Smith_-_Wealth_of_Nations.jpg","stub":"is-there-something-deeply-wrong-with-the-economy","order":50,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726806Smith_-_Wealth_of_Nations.jpg"},{"id":51,"category_id":6,"name":"Why should I be the one to become a visionary?","description":"In comparison with the political entities of our nation \u2013 the parliament, tax office, news organisations, corporations \u2013 our lives seem minor. Why should it matter what I think? I live in a world run by other people \u2013 so we might feel. And this is, to some extent, true. We may not have a great deal of power (yet), and good utopian ideas need to be allied with power \u2013 all its negotiations and compromises and unexciting types of wisdom \u2013 if they are to be effective. Yet the fatal block is often at the beginning: we don\u2019t think that our individual life could be a vehicle for bringing about great changes. Yet, it could. For therapy for our timidity, we should turn to Rousseau\u2019s <i>The Social Contract<\/i>, a treatise on \u2018what is a good society\u2019 written in 1762. We don\u2019t need to read all of it; the point is not to study it for a PhD thesis (an approach that would immediately kill its interest for us). We should flick through it however we like, to get a sense of how this man \u2013 a middle-class secretary from Geneva \u2013 boldly took on the grand questions, in the spare time he could find between chasing women and trying to make a living. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe begins by asking why the visionary task should fall to him \u2013 not a king or a legislator, just a random thoughtful person. His answer is that it falls to him because he wants it to. He takes on the task of being a visionary \u2013 describing what he thinks is necessary to build a good society \u2013 because he cares about Geneva, and thinks it could be organised better, and that its successes have something to teach other cities. He knows that \u2018civilisation\u2019 is still just the early days of an experiment. We are still at the beginning of history.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Jean-Jacques Rousseau ","painting_name":"The Social Contract","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726782Rousseau_-_Social_Contract.jpg","stub":"why-should-i-be-the-one-to-become-a-visionary","order":51,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726782Rousseau_-_Social_Contract.jpg"},{"id":52,"category_id":6,"name":"News addiction","description":"We know that the news skews our worldview. But we don\u2019t often think where to turn for a long-lasting corrective. For this we should read <i>A Little History of The World<\/i>, which presents us with a fuller picture of life on Earth. Gombrich, too, delivers \u2018the news\u2019 \u2013 things which may be new to us, which we need to fit into our worldviews \u2013 but unconstrained by the ultimately limiting criteria of what happens to have happened in the last fifteen minutes or so.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe begin with the greatest inventors of all time: our ancestors who invented cave paintings, tools, pottery, and cooking food. It\u2019s amazing to think about it. Our ancestors in prehistoric Germany used to come home from a long day with only a chunk of raw deer to look forward to. Then one day someone realised that if you hold a bit of deer over the fire you can change the consistency for a delicious and digestible meal (as one excited ancestor must at some point have explained to another). Perhaps on a particularly icy day a lateral-thinking mother warmed her meat to make it more appealing to her child \u2013 and voil\u00e0. Or, take the medieval residents of Florence, who wanted something beyond sombre Gothic architecture, and found a different mentality \u2013 free, independent, light \u2013 in the culture of ancient Greece. They \u2018discovered\u2019 Greece because it was new, to them. It was one case of the past breaking the chains of the present.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"E.H. Gombrich ","painting_name":"A Little History of the World","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726771Gombrich_-_History_of_the_World.jpg","stub":"i-find-the-news-really-depressing","order":52,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726771Gombrich_-_History_of_the_World.jpg"},{"id":53,"category_id":6,"name":"I need a heroic mission","description":"The desire to do something heroic latches on to the big moral missions around. Some adopt climate change as the great battle. Some opt for international development. Then there are always more esoteric choices like setting out to reform the laws governing the design of disabled toilets, or doing something heroic in its outward form, but in essence pointless, like swimming the English Channel or sledding across the Russian tundra.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhat the ethical missions of our day have in common is that they are about reducing threats, and diminishing problems. What is lacking is a constructive project to build societies that are inspiring \u2013 a positive vision being the necessary counterpoint, and motive, for efforts to alleviate suffering. <i>The Needs of Strangers<\/i> is a starting point for getting to grips with the full range of human needs, and thus what a society might look like which met them. We not only need good toilets, we need help with love, finding fulfilling work; we need good parties \u2013 good dinner parties, good dance parties, good national festivals; we need rituals and rites of induction: wiser scripts for weddings and funerals, popular marriage training and therapy. We need scheduled moments to reflect on how many stars there are and how strange the galaxy is, and to analyse ourselves. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe essence of the mission of our day is to get more inventive and ambitious about meeting human needs, in ways that people will appreciate, and therefore pay for. We will have to build organisations which train and organise the talents of millions of people, in order to institute such services and rituals on a wide scale. But the starting point is an intimate one.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Michael Ignatieff ","painting_name":"The Needs of Strangers","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726761Ignatieff_-_The_Needs_of_Strangers.jpg","stub":"i-need-a-heroic-mission","order":53,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726761Ignatieff_-_The_Needs_of_Strangers.jpg"}],"free-time":[{"id":54,"category_id":2,"name":"Writing whatever comes into your head","description":"<i>The Art of the Novel<\/i> is an instruction manual for how to distill insights from passing thoughts. At one point Kundera thinks of an old memory of his, of a woman leaning tenderly on his shoulder. If he was writing a Facebook update at this point, he might have written \u2018nostalgic day today\u2026 kind of sad\u2019. Instead he ponders this memory, and asks himself: what exactly is tenderness? He arrives at successive answers: \u2018tenderness arises when life propels a man to the threshold of adulthood, and he anxiously realises all the advantages of childhood which he had not appreciated as a child\u2019. He processes his experience, trying to get to the heart of his initial, superficial, thought. Revisiting it a few days later, he gets it down to the pithiness of a tweet: \u2018tenderness is the fear instilled by adulthood\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Milan Kundera ","painting_name":"The Art of the Novel","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716718Kundera_-_Art_of_the_Novel.jpg","stub":"what-should-i-write-about","order":54,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716718Kundera_-_Art_of_the_Novel.jpg"},{"id":60,"category_id":2,"name":"I wish I could be more adventurous","description":"Arthur Ransome\u2019s <i>Swallows and Amazons<\/i> is a story about children on holiday in the Lake District, their conviction that \u2018sail\u2019s the thing\u2019 and the adventures that ensue in their little boat \u2018Swallow\u2019. Its central characters, however \u2013 John, Susan, Titty and Roger \u2013 do not quite fit our stereotypes of what adventurous children might be like. They are courteous, careful, deeply honourable, and very interested in keeping a clean camp and synchronizing their watches. This is not because they are dull and conventional, but rather because they refuse to see their exploits as merely a game. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<i>Swallows and Amazons<\/i> can revise our own expectations of what it means to be an adventurous adult. We have landed ourselves with a Romantic conception of the reckless, wild-haired, possibly ignoble, adventurer whom we, on the one hand, aspire to be (fed up with our tame existences), and on the other hand, can never really link up with our to-do-list-writing, bill-paying selves, who are surely \u2018not cut out for adventure\u2019. These children give us a more noble and yet also more useable conception of what an adventurous person might be like. They undertake great tasks but they know that being organised is a big part of it, that one needs to put in a great deal of work to learn fiddly but crucial skills (for us, how to analyse a balance sheet, how to disarm defensive people, how to run a meeting, how to get calm enough to draw others in to trust your vision).<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPerhaps their central insight is that they turn tasks which could be boring into adventures. They camp on a small island and have to fetch milk (they are great drinkers of milk tea) from a farm on the mainland. Other people might complain \u2013 \u2018we have to go and fetch the blasted milk\u2019 \u2013 but for the children, fetching the milk is an adventure, a voyage of exploration. There are lots of day trippers on the lake, but the children simply ignore them, recasting them as seals. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nTouchingly, they are doing all this on Coniston Water in the north of England \u2013 in those days, the 1930s, an utterly conventional holiday destination. They find adventure not because they are daring, but because they are serious, imaginative, well-equipped, and organised. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Arthur Ransome ","painting_name":"Swallows and Amazons","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726695Ransome_-_Swallows_and_Amazons.jpg","stub":"i-wish-i-could-be-more-adventurous","order":55,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726695Ransome_-_Swallows_and_Amazons.jpg"},{"id":62,"category_id":2,"name":"I want to switch off after work","description":"It makes sense that the rhythm of our day should go between various types of work, then seeking to switch off. Work has its demands and things need to be done right. If we do have free time left over we don\u2019t often have much energy left for it.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe get in the habit of taking these emotions \u2013 exhaustion, desire for reward, the longing to get far away \u2013 in a certain practical direction: we download a TV series, or go for a drink with friends. So we may need prompting to be reminded of a different way to satisfy these needs \u2013 a choice we forget because it seems so unlikely: walking back out the door onto the street, and off in a random direction. The book <i>Open City<\/i> is the record of a young doctor in New York who does this most days after work. He doesn\u2019t go walking for exercise; he puts no pressure on himself. He doesn\u2019t try to solve problems on the way. It is his down time. He wanders around the streets, often far away, to escape. He shows us how to lose ourselves, that is, our working selves; to make room for the parts of ourselves that we sideline, which come forwards when we give them space to. He shows us the power of getting physically away, for a moment, from where we live.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe don\u2019t often think that walking around aimlessly is something legitimate that could be done with an early evening. There are so many other possibilities for entertainment, we so rarely come to the downbeat decision: \u2018I am going out for a walk, by myself, with nothing\u2019. Teju Cole gives us the leadership we might need to introduce this activity into our lives. <i>Open City<\/i> helps glamorise an activity \u2013 wandering around \u2013 which creates a period of time that has no demands on it, which is not full of a narrative from a movie, or socialising. When our mind can wander, as our feet do.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Teju Cole ","painting_name":"Open City","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726675Cole_-_Open_City.jpg","stub":"i-want-to-switch-off-after-work","order":56,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726675Cole_-_Open_City.jpg"},{"id":56,"category_id":2,"name":"My tastes are derivative of others","description":"Roland Barthes is not interested in what other people might say. The photographs which happen to pull his attention often seem quite random; they wouldn\u2019t make sense to other people. But his interest is the glimmer of feeling they incite in him. He wants to work out what is going on inside himself.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA girl sends you a card with a picture of a seagull flying across the ocean. To other people, it\u2019s a seagull postcard. But to you it is important \u2013 enigmatic. Is this bird how she imagines me? Is the bird alone? Maybe she would like to be this bird. Why does the sunlight here seem so especially moving? The photo seems full of secret meaning \u2013 other, deeper questions you can\u2019t yet articulate. Barthes wants us not to put it down \u2013 to keep holding it, looking at it, finding the right words for what it makes us think of.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBarthes is interested in the times we linger over something, and he wants to give us the courage to linger more. It doesn\u2019t matter that no one else has stopped to look; you have stopped to look. Why? What are these emotions in you which have latched on to this external object \u2013 this postcard, this photo, this small sketch? It stirs desires and conflicts within you, deep down, and \u2013 at first \u2013 far off.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Roland Barthes ","painting_name":"Camera Lucida","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716768Barthes_-_Camera_Lucida.jpg","stub":"my-tastes-are-derivative-of-others","order":57,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716768Barthes_-_Camera_Lucida.jpg"},{"id":59,"category_id":2,"name":"I just want to be happy","description":"Naturally it would be wonderful never to have to suffer. But this is impossible. We are prey to endless strains and trials of both body and mind. Given this is how things are, de Botton examines a strategic line of thought which he uncovers in the work of Marcel Proust: greater wisdom than the pursuit of happiness lies in finding ways to be properly and productively unhappy. For suffering, in spite of being obviously horrible, opens up unexpected but real possibilities for intelligent and imaginative work. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n\u2018It is as if\u2019 \u2013 writes de Botton \u2013 \u2018the mind were a squeamish organ which refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events\u2019. Suffering of course is not enough on its own. We may all too easily be betrayed in love, fail to get invited to parties, be intellectually anxious or troubled by envy, without this suffering causing us to become wise. Instead we simply become forlorn, defensive and enraged. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nTake for instance one of Proust\u2019s central characters, Madame Verdurin. She wants to be socially successful but she is also terrified of rejection. This fear makes her lampoon and denigrate almost everyone \u2013 especially people at the top of hierarchies \u2013 because if she assures herself they are all stupid, she\u2019ll never have to seek their approval. She\u2019ll never be vulnerable to the suffering of seeking their company and finding that they are not interested in her. By cutting off the possibility of suffering, she limits herself. She can never discover that the people at the top might have a great deal to offer but just not be interested in her. She can only feel safe from pain when she is around people who agree with her completely, and so she has a limited circle of fragile relationships. A bit of moderation, a touch of sympathy for the powerful, and some good-natured curiosity about the lives of others might gain her more true friends.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe big move de Botton makes in <i>How Proust Can Change Your Life<\/i> is to invite us to bring the actual needs and difficulties of our lives with us when we read even such an esteemed classic as Proust\u2019s novel <i>In Search of Lost Time<\/i>. We should read about Madame Verdurin and pause to think: what is this to <i>me<\/i>? In what subtle ways do I seek to avoid suffering \u2013 to my detriment?<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":" Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"How Proust Can Change Your Life","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716838Botton_-_Proust.jpg","stub":"i-just-want-to-be-happy","order":58,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716838Botton_-_Proust.jpg"},{"id":64,"category_id":2,"name":"I live in my head ","description":"The world asks for, and pays for, only one part of you. That\u2019s why you spend so long in your head: what your employers want from you is abstract thought, analysis, judgement. But this distorts you. Day by day, only one bit of you gets used. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOne antidote is <i>The Shadow of the Sun<\/i>, which takes you into the smells and textures of places, beginning in Ghana. The author talks about the almonds, dates, vanilla leaves, oranges, cardamom \u2013 the gentle breezes, thick air; the fans moving in dark shops smelling of paint and incense. Kapuscinski devotes his mind to sensuality and the contrasts the world provides. He has trained himself to register sensual impressions, and articulate them to himself. There\u2019s the smell of sweat and drying fish, spoiling meat and roasted cassava, fresh flowers and putrid algae \u2013 the mix of everything pleasant and irritating, disgusting or seductive. The outer walls are plastered, pale yellow and pale green, with water stains. In the rainy season, more stains appear, in collages, mosaics. Everything is drenched.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe don\u2019t have to go to the same places he did, but he shows us how to be receptive to the world, which is something we can learn for our own holidays, or just for walking around our suburb. A key difference is that being intellectual, you control abstract thoughts; whereas being sensual, the world controls you. So it\u2019s difficult, although healthy, to make that shift: you have to open yourself up to whatever comes. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Ryszard Kapuscinski","painting_name":"The Shadow of the Sun ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726651Kapuscinski_-_Shadow_of_the_Sun.jpg","stub":"i-live-in-my-head","order":59,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726651Kapuscinski_-_Shadow_of_the_Sun.jpg"},{"id":55,"category_id":2,"name":"I feel guilty when I\u2019m not doing something","description":"You\u2019re planning a holiday and it\u2019s stressing you out. Your travelling companion wants to do spectacular things. Go rock climbing! Snowboard! Make friends with wild animals! But you can\u2019t get excited about these vigorous activities \u2013 you just want to take it easy, maybe sit in the hotel restaurant, drink some tangerine juice, look out the window. Yet you can\u2019t help feeling you\u2019re not making the most of your time unless you do something crazy and new. You need a good story to come back with.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nGeoff Dyer\u2019s book is like a friend who gives us permission to be lazy. At one point when Dyer is on holiday in New Orleans he misses the chance to jump on a passing freight train \u2013 something he has always dreamed of trying. He is filled with regret, and wanders home.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut later Dyer spends hours with his new friend Donnelly, sitting around drinking and chatting. In the array of experiences he has in New Orleans, it\u2019s these moments Dyer looks back on most fondly. He shows us that some of the best things happen in our idle moments. On our own holiday, sitting in the restaurant, maybe some thoughts about childhood come to mind. Perhaps we have an interesting series of dreams, over a few days. Our \u2018story\u2019 might be that we spent some time thinking back to our childhood, and drank some interesting juice. Dyer gives us confidence to give less spectacular, more intimate, answers to the question \u2018what happened on holiday?\u2019<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Geoff Dyer ","painting_name":"Yoga For People Who Can\u2019t Be Bothered to Do It","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716743Dyer_-_Yoga.jpg","stub":"i-feel-guilty-when-im-not-doing-something","order":60,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716743Dyer_-_Yoga.jpg"},{"id":57,"category_id":2,"name":"I\u2019m feeling stuck in my life","description":"Feeling stuck is common but we don\u2019t often do anything about it. One person who did was Henry David Thoreau, who joined his family\u2019s pencil-making business in New Hampshire before, in his late twenties, deciding he would live a simplified life. He bought an old shed and transported it to the banks of a secluded lake called Walden Pond in the middle of a forest. Then he set about refurbishing the cabin as his new home. He fitted it out only with what was strictly necessary: a stove, a bed, a table. He lived off the land, grew beans, chopped fire wood, and spent a lot of time alone \u2013 although he did make weekly excursions to a nearby village and his mother came by once a week to do his laundry.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOverall Thoreau lived a very self-reliant life in his cabin by the idyllic lake for two years, two months and two days. It\u2019s a symbolic length of time. He was undertaking an experiment in living, not committing himself permanently. In fact, eventually, Thoreau went back to the factory; he made important improvements in the manufacturing process and built the company into America\u2019s leading maker of pencils. The thing was, he knew \u2013 as usually we do not \u2013 that he was entirely capable of stepping back from his conventional business life. We might at first think that the answer is to follow him: head for the woods. But that\u2019s not really his point. The bigger goals are confidence and inner freedom, the ability to shake off conformism and appreciate simple good things. He happened to acquire these qualities in the woods around Walden Pond. But inspired by his experience we can learn them anywhere.","artist_name":"Henry David Thoreau","painting_name":"Walden ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411743218Thoreau_-_Walden.jpg","stub":"im-feeling-stuck-in-my-life","order":61,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411743218Thoreau_-_Walden.jpg"},{"id":58,"category_id":2,"name":"Numbness","description":"You know you are not yourself recently. You feel hollow inside. Your mind has been shrouded by that \u2018veil of ugliness and insignificance which leaves us incurious before the universe\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBooks are a tool to awaken our minds, by connecting them with a mind which is greater and more developed than our own. We want the author to show us beautiful things, to reveal their splendour to us \u2013 to take us to Giverny on the Seine, to that bend in the river in the morning mist.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe don\u2019t want to spend the whole weekend reading. We want to live more fully. But to do that we need to treat reading as an <i>incitement<\/i> \u2013 to recover our power of thinking, and feeling, for ourselves.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Marcel Proust","painting_name":"Days of Reading","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716809Proust_-_Days_of_Reading.jpg","stub":"i-cant-get-excited-about-anything","order":62,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716809Proust_-_Days_of_Reading.jpg"},{"id":63,"category_id":2,"name":"I wish I was funnier","description":"There is so little advice around for getting funnier. Sometimes, trying to help, people give the annoying advice: don\u2019t try too hard. This is just the kind of advice that confident, funny people give to nervous, unfunny people. Yet there is some truth in this: being entertaining often comes not from trying hard to be entertaining, but from dropping your guard a bit, being more honest, and eventually, enjoying yourself. A key skill is being able to observe yourself throughout life being an idiot: being able to privately admit to and record and remember evidence of your own pettiness, envy, anxiety, and vanity \u2013 to tell later as stories.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe can learn from a model: Nicholson Baker, who in his essay <i>U & I<\/i> \u2013 an account of his semi-imaginary relationship with his hero, the writer John Updike \u2013 is constantly observing himself and his own ridiculousness. On one occasion he flicks through the index of a book, deciding that if he finds a particular name in it, this is an occult sign that he will grow up to become a better writer than John Updike (he doesn\u2019t find it). Baker talks about the paroxysms of envy he feels when Updike writes a small witty sentence. He goes on for two pages about his self-consciousness about using a pretentious word \u2013 \u2018florilegia\u2019 \u2013 thirty pages ago in the essay, telling us about his worry that he had in fact used \u2018florilegia\u2019 before in one of his novels, how he stopped writing the essay to search back through the novels on his computer to see if he had, driven by the fear that <i>Updike<\/i> might somehow read all his work and think he was an idiot for not only using a ridiculous and pretentious word once, but twice \u2013 \u2018what, florilegia <i>again<\/i>?\u2019 Baker is funny because he tells us with articulate confidence about his own anxieties, envy, obsessions, superstitions, and pathetically mixed motives. And he combines this with another key attribute: he enjoys the spotlight and the performance. Anxious as he is, he\u2019s not afraid to also be a bit of a show off.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOf course it is easier to be honest and acutely self-observant in a book, when you have time to craft your acute and witty self-observations. The essay <i>U & I<\/i> is like an instruction manual, an ideal model for us, for how to tell people about our own pettiness and stupidity in our own conversations.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Nicholson Baker ","painting_name":"U & I","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726664Baker_-_U_&_I.jpg","stub":"i-wish-i-was-funnier","order":63,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726664Baker_-_U_&_I.jpg"},{"id":66,"category_id":2,"name":"Sex tourism is not really my thing","description":"The idea of going to a place with the intention of having sex with one of the locals, or other tourist, does not get very good press. And yet it is sometimes the starting point for the best adventures. The trouble is, making this happen takes some guts. At a basic level, it takes admitting to oneself that the intention is there, so that one can ask with excitement, rather than indecision, those two good-looking German lesbian (but \u2018non-exclusive\u2019 lesbian) tourists to come on a road trip to the beach, on the other side of the island. Not that all adventures end well\u2026  But we may need some courage to get started \u2013 perfectly delivered in a book which can be read in 1.5 hours.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Michel Houellebecq ","painting_name":"Lanzarote","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726624Houellebecq_-_Lanzarote.jpg","stub":"sex-tourism-is-not-really-my-thing","order":64,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726624Houellebecq_-_Lanzarote.jpg"},{"id":61,"category_id":2,"name":"Travel didn\u2019t change my life","description":"The longing to have a place change our lives is strong, but we often don\u2019t have any strategy for helping that to happen. Why go to the desert \u2013 why leave the comforts of Eliat, walk for miles with a heavy pack along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, to spend time with rocks and silence? The ancient travellers here would go to this desert and come back having seen God: unfathomable grandeur and power, the role of which is to bring us to accept without bitterness the obstacles we cannot overcome and events we cannot make sense of. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe should set out to travel with similarly high aims. We might decide to go to a desert in order to get perspective on what we are doing with our lives. And we should make this happen: we should bring a notepad, three problems of our life to reflect on under the shade of a suitably large rock, a sketchpad, a print-out of the Book of Job, and two apposite poems. We should use the outer qualities of the place \u2013 bigness, simplicity, space \u2013 as aids to the inner changes we want: to get less hysterical about reaching middle age; to plan the kind of life we want going forward; to record in our minds (via drawing) some specific scenes to recall when we are back in the office: a higher vantage point on our troubles.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOr \u2013 because the point of travel is the inner journey \u2013 a cheaper way than going to the desert might be just to organise a psychologically ambitious visit to the local hill.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"The Art of Travel","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726686Botton_-_Art_of_Travel.jpg","stub":"travel-didnt-change-my-life","order":65,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726686Botton_-_Art_of_Travel.jpg"},{"id":65,"category_id":2,"name":"To be wise is to be critical","description":"The dominant intellectual standard of our time is that intelligent people are critical people. The most striking and brave book reviews \u2018slam\u2019 the book. The wise are the unimpressed ones, in a crowd of enthusiasts. We feel that it\u2019s exciting when someone has made a \u2018devastating attack\u2019 on someone else\u2019s work.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nVirginia Woolf\u2019s essays, if only they could touch our hearts, might teach us a different and superior way to approach intellectual life, for which the foundational principle is generosity. In <i>The Common Reader<\/i> she looks at different writers who she likes, and tries to work out why she likes them. There is the essayist Addison (1672 - 1719), for example, who most people haven\u2019t heard of. His little essays in <i>The Tatler<\/i> and <i>The Spectator<\/i> are not groundbreaking or passionate. There are barriers to us liking this man: his world of silver garters and fringed gloves; his specific recommendations for what young men should do (do not be an atheist; read good books and become a barrister); his insistence that women, regardless of how good looking they are, should never wear large petticoats. But Woolf wants to go through the \u2018cherishing and humanising process\u2019 to discover what is good in Addison. She wants to speak for his merits eloquently so we can see his merits less distracted by the things that might make us pointlessly critical and defensive.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe live in a culture that damages itself by its glamourising of hostility and criticism. Woolf can help us recover the more life-giving role for the critic (and for our daily conversations): to discern what is good and beautiful, and to find the right words to share it. The higher task is learning how to praise well.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Virginia Woolf ","painting_name":"The Common Reader","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411726635Woolf_-_Common_Reader.jpg","stub":"to-be-wise-is-to-be-critical","order":66,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411726635Woolf_-_Common_Reader.jpg"}],"anxiety":[{"id":79,"category_id":7,"name":"Missing out","description":"It is painful to get hints of all the sex going on not where we are: those celebrity parties, university dorms, summer camps, backpacker hostels, that attractive couple having coffee\u2026<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSometimes the honest answer to the question \u2018am I missing out\u2019 is \u2018yes\u2019. In the poem <i>High Windows<\/i> Larkin sees two young people and imagines them having sex. It is painful. But Larkin wants to dignify the sorrow, to help us suffer better \u2013 more nobly \u2013 rather than to try to remove the pain. Envy, longing and regret are inescapable parts of the human condition. Every generation misses out. The broader issue is not so much sexual liberation, but that whatever your life is like, there will be some very appealing (and maybe very good) things which you will not know. The person who has free sex may pine for cosy loyalty, security and life-long trust. We are all longing. We are not, and never will be, alone in this. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nHuman life will go on in envy under the clear, blue sky. We are dissatisfied creatures. But the highest, purest things are what truly refresh us, and have been waiting there for us all along.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Philip Larkin","painting_name":"High Windows ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716579Larkin_-_High_Windows.jpg","stub":"i-feel-im-missing-out","order":67,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716579Larkin_-_High_Windows.jpg"},{"id":67,"category_id":7,"name":"Plans falling apart","description":"<i>The Tiger Who Came To Tea<\/i> is a story about how to cope with unexpected events \u2013 in this case, an unexpected visitor (a tiger) who knocks on the door demanding hospitality (tea). The daughter of the family opens the door and is surprised at the visitor, but the mother remembers her manners and keeps calm. She thinks, \u2018Oh, a tiger. Slightly unusual. But totally OK\u2019. So the tiger is invited in. But the tiger isn\u2019t satisfied with a single portion of anything offered to him by the mother and daughter. He drinks all the drink, eats all the food, even empties the taps of water. When the father arrives home and discovers there\u2019s no food left, however, he likewise retains his poise. \u2018Oh, no food! Well, let\u2019s go to a caf\u00e9\u2019. So they spend the evening out together.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is hard to retain poise in the face of problems. Plans fail, meetings go overtime, flights get cancelled. The reactions of the family show us that irritation in situations like these is often of little use. Life goes on. In the story, the mother and daughter go out to buy new groceries. They even purchase a big tin of Tiger Food in case the tiger should return. But of course, he never does. And that\u2019s the point of the story: one can\u2019t plan for the unexpected. One has to learn to take it in one\u2019s stride.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Judith Kerr ","painting_name":"The Tiger Who Came To Tea","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716187Kerr_-_Tiger_Who_Came_to_Tea.jpg","stub":"everything-is-going-wrong","order":68,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716187Kerr_-_Tiger_Who_Came_to_Tea.jpg"},{"id":68,"category_id":7,"name":"I feel insignificant, like I don't really count","description":"Sometimes we can feel painfully unimportant in the scheme of things, puny in comparison with the powerful, marginalised in comparison with the glamorous, causally vulnerable to the brute forces of the economy. At times like this self-worth withers. There\u2019s a feeling of being worthless, a minor cog in the machine. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn her essay <i>The Death of the Moth<\/i> Virginia Woolf meditates on a little moth that flutters around the window-pane near her desk, trying to find a way outside. Its life is so meagre and limited. In brusque moments a moth seems a mere nuisance, to be swatted or crushed without hesitation. Outside, through the window, she can see the bigger, grander rhythms of life. Birds are venturing into the sky, a farmer is ploughing the land so as to harness nature to his own ends. And further away, we know that somewhere a physicist is making a great scientific breakthrough, cabinets are taking historic decisions, cities are being built; someone is starting out on a career that will lead to fame and fortune. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut Woolf has great tenderness for the fragile moth and its limited life, and the fact that its hay-coloured wings can carry it no further than a corner of the window. It is \u2018a tiny bead of pure life\u2019. Properly seen, it is a marvellous, beautiful thing \u2013 and through her essay we can be drawn to see afresh, and with deserved generosity, the worth of our own lives. Defeated by the simple, but to it incomprehensible, barrier of a pane of glass, the moth dies in its pitiful attempt to reach the sunshine and flowers of the garden.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn ancient Greece the moth genus was named <i>psyche<\/i>, meaning soul. Which helps us, if we need it, to see how we might look on our own unlikely spark of life the way she, that day, looked on the moth.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Virginia Woolf ","painting_name":"The Death of the Moth","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716313Woolf_-_Death_of_the_Moth.jpg","stub":"i-feel-so-insignificant-like-i-dont-really-count","order":69,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716313Woolf_-_Death_of_the_Moth.jpg"},{"id":69,"category_id":7,"name":"I care too much about the approval of others","description":"Pascal does not believe in listening to the niceness of others. To wean us off seeking approval, he wants to teach us something surprising \u2013 forbidden, even: he wants to train us to be more misanthropic. We should train ourselves in misanthropy via regular perusal of his collected thoughts, the <i>Pens\u00e9es<\/i>. Most people are stupid, their activity is almost all flattery, and they devote much of their time on Earth to seeking approval and justifying themselves. The number of your followers on Twitter going up or down by one or two, or two hundred, is meaningless \u2013 much as it might flatter you to think otherwise. It is incredibly hard to break out of the sense that \u2018likes\u2019 matter. But human beings live in a half-distracted dream, almost completely absorbed in the self-referential motions of their own minds. What they are giving you is not acceptance. If you think it is you will not be prepared for when they turn their fangs on you. For them you are a distant set of disjointed phenomena on the fringe of their consciousness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nTo desire acceptance is a generous human impulse, but to crave its jazzier lipsticked cousin, applause, is to forget how many of our own compliments are not straightforward truths, and how few of our own Facebook \u2018likes\u2019 are truly and passionately meant. It is not that all reactions and opinions are empty or compromised, just that almost all of them are. Regular reminders that other people\u2019s brains are like swamps, and really not worth caring about, can help shake us free from our desire to please and defibrillate our bolder, more autonomous selves.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Blaise Pascal ","painting_name":"Pens\u00e9es","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716368Pascal_-_Pensees.jpg","stub":"i-care-too-much-about-the-approval-of-others","order":70,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716368Pascal_-_Pensees.jpg"},{"id":70,"category_id":7,"name":"I really should read more","description":"There is so much to read \u2013 there are so many good books out there, and thousands of new books published each year. The pressure to read a lot can make us anxious. Montaigne developed an unusual tactic in response to the pressure to be knowledgeable: he decided to resist it. He had a few classic books which he loved and read many times; but he focused his free time not on reading but on writing small essays, which were attempts to describe what was going on inside himself. He was a bit like someone who gets ambitious about writing diary entries or blog posts. He consoled himself, and us, with the observation that the man digging vegetables in the garden was wiser than most of the professors at the Sorbonne. The gardener is wiser because the point of reading is to get better at living, therefore the gardener, who is already living well, is ahead of the professor, who is not using reading to live better.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe knowledge we need might not be waiting in books. It might be lying in our own unprocessed past experience. We all have enough experience to be wise, if we were to spend the time going over it. The barrier \u2013 the stupid distraction \u2013 is the desire to look educated in the eyes of those who try to read everything.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Michel de Montaigne ","painting_name":"Essays","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716392Montaigne_-_Essays.jpg","stub":"i-really-should-read-more","order":71,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716392Montaigne_-_Essays.jpg"},{"id":71,"category_id":7,"name":"I fear the worst","description":"The temptation, to console, is to tell them that their fears are exaggerated: \u2018don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s not going to happen\u2019. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, while unwittingly implying that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA better approach than saying \u2018it will be fine\u2019 is to help them head bravely towards the idea that it will not be fine. Play through, step by step, what would happen if the worst happened: how things would fall apart, piece by piece, how long the grieving process would take, how, in detail, they would go on afterwards. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nLeaving the worst undiscussed leaves it looming in the background, more frightening for not having been brought into focus. Real consolation comes from bringing the dark possibilities into the light \u2013 and then remembering that we have more strength in ourselves than we tend to predict.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"The Consolations of Philosophy","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716413Botton_-_Consolations_of_Philosophy.jpg","stub":"i-fear-the-worst","order":72,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716413Botton_-_Consolations_of_Philosophy.jpg"},{"id":72,"category_id":7,"name":"Why can\u2019t I get to sleep?","description":"The thoughts that we don\u2019t make space for ourselves to have during the day take revenge on us at night and cause insomnia. At any one time we might have 14 different things on our minds to worry about, each jostling to get into the front of consciousness, pushing each other successively out of the spotlight. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBertrand Russell proposes a forceful remedy for this trouble: mental discipline. We need to learn the skill of being more in control of what topics we allow ourselves to begin to ruminate on. There is a proper art to worrying. Catch yourself in the half-conscious process of jumping between topics (work project, household chore, argument you had, receding hairline, sore toe, email); don\u2019t let yourself start on a new anxiety before you have fully processed the current one. Processing a worry means coming to an explicit view on what the worry is fully about: the big issues that the specific case is connected with (my receding hairline worry is a worry about getting old), and deciding something to do about it (I am going to find a novel which deals with the theme of leaving youth behind). Make time for the worry while it is in the spotlight; have the courage to stay with the uncomfortable feelings, follow their connections; examine and put words to what you feel. But be forceful with yourself; the key is not to let your mind jump away.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Bertrand Russell ","painting_name":"The Conquest of Happiness","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716437Russell_-_Conquest_of_Happiness.jpg","stub":"why-cant-i-get-to-sleep","order":73,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716437Russell_-_Conquest_of_Happiness.jpg"},{"id":73,"category_id":7,"name":"I hate the thought of middle age","description":"Our society strongly endorses the idea that youth is better than age. And once we are past a certain age we really do start to fear getting older. It is possible to dread turning 30 or 40 or 50.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn the book <i>Sinister Street<\/i>, the hero Michael appears to have an enviable youth. He is at Oxford having a wonderful time. He is involved in running a little magazine, goes to fantastic parties, gets drunk with his friends. He delves into medieval history and sits up at night speculating on the meaning of life. He toys with religion and flirts with pretty girls. Understandably, Michael views the prospect of getting older, and leaving all this behind, with alarm.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut under the surface, all is not well. The story Michael tells about his life (the highlights) makes it sound enviable. But really he is just in the normal condition of youth: not having much self-knowledge, not being able to figure out what he wants, dominated by the fear of not fitting in, emotionally fragile.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThen in his late 20s Michael makes a trip to Rome. One night he finds himself standing in front of a giant black column inscribed with the heroes of the past. These men were greater, more capable and personally powerful, than he is. And all of a sudden Michael is struck by humility \u2013 the thought of just how parochial his youth has been: anxious, scattered, not yet aware of the exalted things that might inspire him. He realises he was wrong about youth. They were never meant to be the great years. They were meant to be the preparatory years.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur fear of getting older is real, because it is a real possibility that we\u2019ll get stuck in the inadequacies of youth. Growing up takes effort: to become better at self-knowledge, confidence, relationships, coping with difficulties, being receptive to the world. But if we put in the work, truly better states of being \u2013 different, and broader in ways that we can\u2019t imagine \u2013 lie ahead.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Compton Mackenzie ","painting_name":"Sinister Street","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716461Mackenzie_-_Sinister_Street.jpg","stub":"i-hate-the-thought-of-middle-age","order":74,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716461Mackenzie_-_Sinister_Street.jpg"},{"id":74,"category_id":7,"name":"People are unequal but this is too dangerous to think","description":"A forbidden thought today is that people might be unequal in ways that really matter. We readily recognise, and sometimes deplore, material inequality. But Plato wants us to accept and embrace a kind of inequality that we might feel compelled to deny is even possible. This is, approximately, spiritual inequality. In <i>The Republic<\/i> he argues that wisdom is insight into what is genuinely good and that, therefore, a society needs to be ruled by the wisest people. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe thought that there might be significant inequalities of spirit places us in some bad company, and this makes us panic and throw away the whole idea. We look at the worst, rather than the best examples. We imagine superior wisdom being linked with snobbery or racial theories or just an appalling smugness. But that can\u2019t be right. No-one who actually was wise would countenance those things. Plato was horrified by what he saw of the society around him: the disgusting rich people, the meteoric rise of some charlatan, the casual ruination of some very decent person; the way a demagogue could dominate public opinion. He hated how in a democracy someone could gain power just by saying whatever the majority wanted to hear; and he hated how in aristocratic societies someone would end up at the top because of who their parents were. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nFar better, he thought, if government were assigned to the wisest people. Plato leaves us with a conundrum. We can\u2019t really doubt that some people are wiser than others. It is utterly depressing to take the worst, most mean, abusive, selfish person you\u2019ve ever met and insist that it is impossible for anyone to be better than that. And we can\u2019t really doubt that it would be best if the wisest were in charge. Hostility to bosses almost always comes down to their lack of wisdom. The problem isn\u2019t actually around some being wiser than others. It is a quite different and much more serious one. How on Earth would wiser people get into power? Plato doesn\u2019t know. But he raises the right question. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe question is a difficult one because the recognition of inequality is not so much dangerous, as it is personally painful.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Plato","painting_name":"The Republic","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716482Plato_-_Republic.jpg","stub":"people-are-unequal-but-this-is-too-dangerous-to-think","order":75,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716482Plato_-_Republic.jpg"},{"id":75,"category_id":7,"name":"Who am I?","description":"We often feel that it\u2019s conceited to dwell on ourselves. <i>Liking<\/i> ourselves is a sign of arrogance. Pride is bad, self-effacement is good. Schopenhauer turns this equation on its head. It is rather the case, he argues, that we don\u2019t appreciate ourselves enough. And if we don\u2019t appreciate ourselves, how will we ever find out who we really are?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nTo illustrate this point <i>The Wisdom of Life<\/i> contrasts a person who is proud with one who is merely vain. The proud person affirms their own self-worth \u2013 but in private, from within; the vain person seeks this affirmation through others \u2013 from without. Snow White\u2019s stepmother is the classic example of vanity: she asks the Magic Mirror each day to affirm that she is the fairest in the land. She does not stop to ask herself who is \u2018the fairest of them all\u2019. If she did, she might have to make some reassessments.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nFor Schopenhauer, the sign of vanity is excessive affability. Too much talking, too little thinking. As he wryly puts it, \u2018rascals are always sociable\u2019. This does not mean that Schopenhauer detests society or that he would have us renounce our friends. Pride (as opposed to vanity) is for him simply the act of taking some time out of one\u2019s workaday life for thoughtful introspection in order to appreciate ourselves without the pressures of competitive social striving. We imagine we are being inoffensively self-effacing, not dwelling on ourselves, when in fact we are often just acting out of the fear of pride. We are <i>too<\/i> afraid of pride. We miss the fact that by avoiding self-appreciation, we might be backing ourselves even further into the other extreme: anxiety about the self. Which puts us even further away from knowing who we are.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Arthur Schopenhauer","painting_name":"The Wisdom of Life","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716500Schopenhauer_-_Wisdom_of_Life.jpg","stub":"who-am-i","order":76,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716500Schopenhauer_-_Wisdom_of_Life.jpg"},{"id":76,"category_id":7,"name":"I feel like a failure","description":"Your efforts have been scattered, and life has gone by quickly. It is easy to feel that your life has not amounted to much. Where did the last decade go? At times like these one seems on the verge of an immense sadness, or remorse. T.S. Eliot wrote these poems late in his life, when he was struggling with feeling this way.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nEliot doesn\u2019t hold back from allowing himself to feel sadness, sometimes intensely. But in the final poem of the set of four, <i>Little Gidding<\/i>, he comes to a conclusion which is a deeply lovely expression of hope. Eliot says that to see our lives as a fundamental failure is a problem of a lack of understanding of our own efforts \u2013 our own striving. We think that our lives are fragmented and not very impressive, but actually in all our efforts, underneath the official story, we have been searching for great things: for unity and beauty, for substantial and worthy glory.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nEliot is endorsing and acknowledging what we have already been doing. And this is comforting because he is telling us that actually, we are already hopeful. Eliot isn\u2019t saying, get more hopeful; he\u2019s saying, actually you are more hopeful than you realise. You are because you have kept on trying. You, who are sensitive to the beauty of the world \u2013 to the fog in the fir trees, to the sea salt crystallising on a rose by the ocean \u2013 you who fail (or feel you fail) are all the time in fact good. He is tender to our imperfect efforts, when we might have a tendency to be too harsh on ourselves. When our harshness would in fact blind us to what there is to see.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"T.S. Eliot ","painting_name":"Four Quartets ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716518TS_Eliot_-_Four_Quartets.jpg","stub":"i-feel-like-a-failure","order":77,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716518TS_Eliot_-_Four_Quartets.jpg"},{"id":78,"category_id":7,"name":"I\u2019m too needy","description":"Usually our question is, \u2018how can I become less needy?\u2019 Religions have tended to set out in the opposite direction. Their question is, \u2018how can we be kind to ourselves and accept our neediness?\u2019 Religions, from Judaism, to Christianity, to Buddhism, are comfortable with the idea that we are all much more like children than we tend to confess. Our robust modern culture takes as its starting point the assumption that we are all resilient enough to cope with freedom. Religions, in contrast, start with wanting to be more tender to our often childish needs.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nReligions know that if we read an inspiring quote about enduring anxiety we will have forgotten it approximately 6 minutes later, and therefore, like children, we need to rehearse it, perhaps 86 more times, before we will remember it. Religions know that our resolution to be patient, so admirable in the morning, will dissolve by lunch time. They know that we need scheduled opportunities to apologise (Yom Kippur); that a part of us longs to throw ourselves at the feet of a mother who hears and consoles all the cries of the world, and yet survives (Guan Yin).<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOne proposal in <i>Religion for Atheists<\/i> is to revive the celebration known as the Feast of Fools, once official Catholic practice in the Middle Ages, during which the priest hosts drinking competitions on the altar and everyone has sex with whoever they like in the church. The point of the practice was to acknowledge our need to be immature; to act it out together, so that the following morning we could go back to being sober, faithful, and sane; knowing that even with all the wildness in us, and all our childish impulses, we can still contain, forgive and look after one another.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Alain de Botton ","painting_name":"Religion for Atheists","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716563Botton_-_Religion_for_Atheists.jpg","stub":"im-too-needy","order":79,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716563Botton_-_Religion_for_Atheists.jpg"},{"id":80,"category_id":7,"name":"I can\u2019t do great things","description":"We feel that it is modest and realistic to admit that we don\u2019t have it in us for a heroic life: becoming a writer like Goethe, reforming universities, building a business empire. <i>Human, All Too Human<\/i> recalibrates our mindset. We are of course limited and flawed and at the mercy of fortune and genetics. But too often our praise of another person as a <i>genius<\/i> is a way of not getting serious about competing with them. We turn them into a distant star in order not to feel envy; to avoid finding out how they really did it, in their flawed, all-too-human way. It is painful to admit that the difference between us and them might not be a divine spark but just seriousness: a wise assessment of their own attempts, a lack of vanity, and a degree of hard work we have only deluded ourselves into believing we have attempted \u2013 their willingness to come back 236 times for another attempt. \u2018The great people, too, do nothing other than first learn to place stones, then to build\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Friedrich Nietzsche","painting_name":"Human, All Too Human","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1411716594Nietzsche_-_Human_All_Too_Human.jpg","stub":"i-cant-do-great-things","order":80,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1411716594Nietzsche_-_Human_All_Too_Human.jpg"}]}