Splendid Isolation Quotes

Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries.

Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

The wind blew through the window. The trousers swayed. Doubtless when they were on Mr. Craggs, the trousers looked splendid and went perfectly well together with his body. But like this, isolated in space, Mr. Cragg's trousers were nightmarish. The wind blew through the window. As they swayed, the trousers were alive. A shot, truncated, square creature consisting entirely of legs, belly and what went with them. And now it would get down and start walking among people and over people and grow and...

We must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, to find that enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song. But in that dance, and in that song, the most ancient rites of our conscience fulfill themselves in the awareness of being human. —Pablo Neruda, Toward the Splendid City

One can seek ambiguities and incompleteness, but not in the case if the United States and Israel, which remain in splendid isolation, not only in words.

I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be.

Modern virtues are self-referential. There's a relentless circling back to the individual's subjective state of being. But we are of no use to ourselves or anyone else if we cultivate our virtues in splendid isolation. The wellbeing of the group is a necessary precondition to all and any individual needs, ethics and choices. The elevation of vulnerability as a virtue creates an environment increasingly antithetical to free speech. If my ideas are even remotely likely to offend your feelings, then there is enormous pressure on me not to express them. The present-day promotion of feelings over facts is a clear danger to democracy. Neoliberalism sees your earnest desire to live by 21st-century virtues, and promptly, efficiently and shamelessly monetises it.

In a Whispering Gallery That whisper takes the voice Of a Spirit, speaking to me, Close, but invisible, And throws me under a spell At the kindling vision it brings; And for a moment I rejoice, And believe in transcendent things That would make of this muddy earth A spot for the splendid birth Of everlasting lives, Whereto no night arrives; And this gaunt gray gallery A tabernacle of worth On this drab-aired afternoon, When you can barely see Across its hazed lacune If opposite aught there be Of fleshed humanity Wherewith I may commune; Or if the voice so near Be a soul’s voice floating here.

I must thank you for it all. I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.” Leaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I meditated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind.

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

In his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud recalled: "When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressure and preoccupations of today, it seems to me like a glorious 'heroic era'; my 'splendid isolation' was not lacking in advantages and in charms." It is striking that one encounter virtually the same words and affects-the heights and the depths- in the recollections of other innovators as they reflect on their subjective state on the eve of their greatest breakthroughs.

Our modern microscopes, scanners, and sensors have disabused us of most of the old fanciful notions about the brain’s function. But the brain’s strangely remote quality—the way it seems both part of us and apart from us—still influences our perceptions in subtle ways. We have a sense that our brain exists in a state of splendid isolation, that its fundamental nature is impervious to the vagaries of our day-to-day lives. While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor of experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience. We want to believe that the impressions our brain records as sensations and stores as memories leave no physical imprint on its own structure. To believe otherwise would, we feel, call into question the integrity of the self.

department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success. It struck me that this was a pretty good representation of Churchill’s first year as prime minister

As my stacks of documents accumulated, I began mapping my narrative, using the so-called Vonnegut curve, a graphic device conceived by Kurt Vonnegut in his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, which his department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success.

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

moi je suis fâché contre notre cercle patriarcal parce qu’il y vient toujours un homme du type le plus insupportable. Vous tous, messieurs, le connaissez très bien. Son nom est Légion. C’est un homme qui a bon coeur, et n’a rien qu’un bon coeur. Comme si c’était une chose rare à notre époque d’avoir bon coeur ; comme si, enfin, on avait besoin d’avoir bon coeur ; cet éternel bon coeur ! L’homme doué d’une si belle qualité a l’air, dans la vie, tout à fait sûr que son bon coeur lui suffira pour être toujours content et heureux. Il est si sûr du succès qu’il néglige tout autre moyen en venant au monde. Par exemple, il ne connaît ni mesure ni retenue. Tout, chez lui, est débordant, à coeur ouvert. Cet homme est enclin à vous aimer soudain, à se lier d’amitié, et il est convaincu qu’aussitôt, réciproquement, tous l’aimeront, par ce seul fait qu’il s’est mis à aimer tout le monde. Son bon coeur n’a même jamais pensé que c’est peu d’aimer chaudement, qu’il faut posséder l’art de se faire aimer, sans quoi tout est perdu, sans quoi la vie n’est pas la vie, ni pour son coeur aimant ni pour le malheureux que, naïvement, il a choisi comme objet de son attachement profond. Si cet homme se procure un ami, aussitôt celui-ci se transforme pour lui en un meuble d’usage, quelque chose comme un crachoir. Tout ce qu’il a dans le coeur, n’importe quelle saleté, comme dit Gogol, tout s’envole de la langue et tombe dans le coeur de l’ami. L’ami est obligé de tout écouter et de compatir à tout. Si ce monsieur est trompé par sa maîtresse, ou s’il perd aux cartes, aussitôt, comme un ours, il fond, sans y être invité, sur l’âme de l’ami et y déverse tous ses soucis. Souvent il ne remarque même pas que l’ami lui-même a des chagrins par-dessus la tête : ou ses enfants sont morts, ou un malheur est arrivé à sa femme, ou il est excédé par ce monsieur au coeur aimant. Enfin on lui fait délicatement sentir que le temps est splendide et qu’il faut en profiter pour une promenade solitaire. Si cet homme aime une femme, il l’offensera mille fois par son caractère avant que son coeur aimant le remarque, avant de remarquer (si toutefois il en est capable) que cette femme s’étiole de son amour, qu’elle est dégoûtée d’être avec lui, qu’il empoisonne toute son existence. Oui, c’est seulement dans l’isolement, dans un coin, et surtout dans un groupe que se forme cette belle oeuvre de la nature, ce « spécimen de notre matière brute », comme disent les Américains, en qui il n’y a pas une goutte d’art, en qui tout est naturel. Un homme pareil oublie – il ne soupçonne même pas –, dans son inconscience totale, que la vie est un art, que vivre c’est faire oeuvre d’art par soi-même ; que ce n’est que dans le lien des intérêts, dans la sympathie pour toute la société et ses exigences directes, et non dans l’indifférence destructrice de la société, non dans l’isolement, que son capital, son trésor, son bon coeur, peut se transformer en un vrai diamant taillé.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

I've always liked fairytales. It was probably the illustrations that first drew me in – beautiful ones from an Italian publisher, if I recall. But growing up in the country, surrounded by trees, fairly isolated and with rather primitive technology at the house, the stories seemed to seep into reality more than they might have otherwise. Fairytales are also a wonderful vocabulary (almost an alphabet) of storytelling among people who know them. You can use fairytale elements to build entirely new stories; images that work as independent pictures and narratives for viewers and readers who are new to them. But once that audience becomes aware of the depth of history and the ongoing conversation that is happening through all those layers of tellings and retellings and reimaginings, there is a splendid depth and resonance you can access.

England acted to maintain the “Pax Britannica” in British colonies, and global stability in British areas of influence. Under the leadership of Conservative leaders such as Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the British Empire adopted a foreign policy known as the “Splendid Isolation.” This policy sought to maintain the global balance of power while limiting the need for any sort of British intervention in other powers’ internal affairs along with any alliance that would demand a British intervention.

I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map, he had said, was for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its complete isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

In light of the facts, we have to accept that the terms we translated as “dwarf” or “giant” designate families, races of beings cohabitating in the same mythology and even having relations with each other. They do not live each in their own corner, in splendid isolation; they mix with each other—I will provide illustrations of this later—and with humans, and to do so they change size.

A Sunset I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens, Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, In numerous leafage bosomed close; Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere On cloudy archipelagos. Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! A hundred clouds in motion, Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, Their unimagined shapes accord: Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through, As if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew A sudden elemental sword. The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold, The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze; Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze, Great moveless meres of radiance. Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track, Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, A triple row of pointed teeth? Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side With scales of golden mail ensheathe. Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees. Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice Ruins immense in mounded wrack; Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown When the earthquake heaves its hugy back. These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronz¨¨d glows, Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose, Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms, 'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep, As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep His dreadful and resounding arms! All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red Into the furnace stirred to fume, Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire The vaporous and inflam¨¨d spaume. O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale, In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil? With love that has not speech for need! Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night Fantasy them starre brede.

Article 9 of Bhutan’s constitution says: “The State shall strive to promote those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

The greatest religion gives suffering to nobody,” reads a weather-beaten sign, quoting the Buddha, at Chele La pass, the highest motorable point in the country, near Paro. This maxim is everywhere evident. As a Bhutanese friend and I walked in the mountains one afternoon, he reflexively removed insects from the path and gently placed them in the verge, out of harm’s way. Early one morning in Thimphu, I saw a group of young schoolboys, in their spotless white-sleeved ghos, crouching over a mouse on the street, gently offering it food. In Bhutan, the horses that trudge up the steep trail to the Tiger’s Nest monastery are reserved for out-of-shape tourists; Bhutanese don’t consider horses beasts of burden and prefer not to make them suffer under heavy loads. Even harvesting honey is considered a sign of disrespect for the industrious bees; my young guide, Kezang, admonished me for buying a bottle of Bhutanese honey to take home. (Chastened, I left it there.) In

Happiness, he said, warming his hands around a fresh cup of coffee, is a choice. “You have to brew it in yourself. Even from a lump of food, we choose each grain to suit our need. Likewise, in the philosophical manner, we choose to be who we are.

Feel the splendid isolation, the momentary step into timelessness.

An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were almost exterminated within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically

The biggest problem with the current conception of international assistance is that it presupposes the existence of a fundamentally fair market balance in which each country is the legitimate owner of the wealth it has produced and accumulated in the past, in splendid isolation. But that is not at all how things happened. The enrichment of the West since the industrial revolution could not have occurred without the global division of labor and the frenetic exploitation of the planet’s natural and human resources.

Few historians have really delved into the spirit of the Brazilian people and their condition. To understand the condition of the real Brazil, it is necessary to understand that colonial isolationism remained. During the colonial period, Brazil was kept away from everything, so as not to attract the greed of other nations and conquerors. Preserved in this state of isolation, which was anything but splendid, the liberal and socialist ideas that brought about great changes in Europe and the rest of the world were always received here with due caution – which was not harmful. The rulers themselves, fearing losing power, made a point of granting small advantages to the people, and, by giving them crumbs with a great samba plot, they avoided greater losses. Brazilians are sentimental and, in the same way, they are irascible; therefore, they are easily manipulated. Isolation did not remain without costs, as it generated misery, delay and ignorance among the people. On the other hand, it produced a lazy, indolent and belligerent elite, averse to work, knowledge and the defense of the greatest national interests. In other words, keeping the Brazilian people in a state of minority was the price to pay for maintaining this tropical nobility.

Spiritual life can be regarded as a course of gradual recovery from the addiction to the peculiar type of awareness that splits everything into subject and object. This primary addiction is the seedbed from which arise all secondary addictions. These latter are possible only because the ego is confronted by objects, which it tries to control or by which it is, or feels, controlled. To be more specific, the secondary addictions are all substitutes for the bliss that is the essence of the experience of transparency, which is at the heart of the integral consciousness, as defined by Gebser. This experience of transparency reveals the archaic interconnectedness and simultaneity of all beings and things without disowning, displacing, or distorting the cognitive realizations characteristic of the magical, mythical, and mental structures of consciousness. The secondary addictions are desperate, if mistaken, attempts to remove the primary addiction, which is our addiction to self-conscious experience, revolving around the division between subject (mind) and object (world). They are mistaken because instead of removing the primary addiction, they fortify it and thus also aggravate the sense of isolation and powerlessness experienced by the faltering rational personality. The British novelist Aldous Huxley saw this very clearly. He said: The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works, and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates alcohol and “goof-pills” in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.7 Huxley did not even mention workaholism and sex as two widely used substitutes for the realization of originary bliss. He spoke, however, of some people’s fascination with, and fatal attraction to, precious stones. This passion for gems, Huxley observed, is anchored in the fact that they “bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.”8 But deeper still than such splendid visions is, to use Gebser’s terms, the transcendental “light” of the undivided Origin itself.9 Realizing that “light” through voluntary self-transcendence is the ultimate form of healing both the person and the planet. That is the purpose of authentic spirituality. Spiritual life can usefully be pictured as a progressive recovery from the addiction of ordinary life, which is inherently schizoid and hence lacking in fullness and bliss. The well-known twelve-step program of recovery used in the literature on addiction also can serve as a convenient model for the spiritual process. Spiritual recovery is an uncovering of the spiritual dimension, whether we call it transcendental Self, God, Goddess, or the Ultimate—the dimension that is ordinarily covered up by the self-divided ego-personality, especially when it comes under the influence of the rational consciousness.

a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess.

It is no coincidence that every Slow Fixer we have met so far, from IDEO to Le Laboratoire to NASA, warns against fetishizing the group. Instead, their aim is to forge a symbiotic relationship between collective and individual toil, giving everyone the freedom to nurture their own ideas in splendid isolation before pushing them through the filter of the team or the crowd.

Running neck-in-neck with Amherst on the selectivity chart, Williams occupies a campus of surpassing beauty in the foothills of the Berkshires. Has shaken the preppy image, but still attracts plenty of well-toned all-around jock-intellectuals. The splendid isolation of Williamstown is either a blessing or a curse. (The Elite Liberal Arts Colleges - Williams College)

Some see solitude as loneliness. Others see it as a foetal state from which to blunder out into the world. I see it as a breathing space for contemplation and, indeed, breeding space for ideas.

This frightful war!" The words were constantly upon his lips, ejaculated to himself in reception of new manifestations of its eruptions; forever in his mind, like a live thing gnawing there. Other people seemed to suffer the war in spasms, isolated amidst the round of their customary routines, of dejection or of optimistic reassurance. The splendid sentiment of "Business as usual" was in many valiant mouths.

If we did the hard work of forming these relationships and preserving these connections, millions of them, old and new, official and unofficial, then together they would form lasting bonds—“sinews of peace,” he called them. “The Sinews of Peace,” he underscored for his audience in Fulton that day, was the title of his speech and its purpose. This speech was not a call to arms. It was a call to form Constellations. He feared that Americans might want to sit it out in isolation again after two world wars or, just as bad, remain perpetually poised for war, with the Western world dependent on American military might. Winning wasn’t the end—it was a prologue to a new and different kind of work. “We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration” to increase “each other’s . . . powers.” Remember that Churchill had foreshadowed this at the welcome luncheon for Winant when he said that with victory would come “solemn but splendid duties.” It was time to let go of the Pyramid mindset. This would require “faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future, and charity towards each other’s shortcomings.