Things you might try to pass on

I find it hard to believe that the Paxman/Kissinger encounter on ‘Start The Week’ occurred all the way back in 1999 (here’s a Guardian piece about it, too). (I heard it live and I’d love to hear it again: all these years on, a kind of acoustical aftershock is still resonating in my head.) It’s recalled in the first comment to a 2002 post by David Weinberger. Weinberger calls Kissinger a ‘disgraceful, banal man’.

I came across a quotation from Kissinger recently that struck me. (That’s thought-provoking in itself — to come across something that seems important said by someone for whom, at best, you don’t much care.) This is from Nat Torkington’s excellent O’Reilly Radar post earlier this month, Rethinking Open Data. The last sentence is his own.

Henry Kissinger said, “each success only buys admission to a more difficult problem”. I look forward to learning what the next problem is.

In the same post, there’s a lovely bit which runs:

As Krishna was told by Arjuna, “a man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the Absolute, he must evolve toward it”. I’m just noting that, as with all creative endeavours, we learned about the problem by starting to fix it. …

Conveying something valuable about life’s complexities and problems — that’s one of the very best things in teaching, whether done within a disciplined area of study, in guiding an enthusiasm or individual project or in being alongside someone in the larger matters of living itself.

I liked very much what the Guardian reported Rowan Williams said recently in a lecture about Dostoevsky: ‘he loved Dostoevsky’s characters because of their soul-searching and sharing of other people’s burdens’. And there was this (the words are Williams’ own):

Irony is when you recognise that your own sense of dramatic power is always something that is going to be absurd in the light of truth. The readiness to cope with that absurdity is something that you have to learn in order to grow up.

That’s good.