Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Cecilia Ergueta

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Cecilia Ergueta

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
Cecilia Ergueta

'The Art of the Qur'an,' a Rare Peek at Islam's Holy Text - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-peek-at-islams-holy-text.html

culture history religion islam art

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.
  • So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged
  • When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Spilling out of books onto wall tiles, ceramic vessels, glass lamps, textiles, mosque domes and building facades, it was both a sensual and ideological unifier, totalizingly utopian
  • Symbols were introduced to orchestrate the all-important recitation of its contents: indicators of where to pause, where to place emphasis, how to pronounce words.
  • Material preciousness became an end in itself, turning Qurans into prestige objects and political currency, valued as diplomatic gifts, as war booty and as pious, grace-earning donations to mosques and mausoleums.
  • I watched them as they looked intently at the manuscripts arrayed around us, and I knew they were seeing things I couldn’t see, and feeling things I couldn’t feel, because they could read the words.
  • I was aware — and this is an easy perception — of the larger barriers of unknowing that stand between art and understanding, and of the barriers that stand between cultures
Cecilia Ergueta

The Meaning of Bob Dylan's Silence - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-of-bob-dylans-silence.html

existentialism literature

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • a human being cannot simply be what he or she is, in the way that an inkwell simply is an inkwell
  • “being what one is not” is an abdication of freedom; it involves turning oneself into an object, a role, meant for other people. To remain free, to act in good faith, is to remain the undefined, free, protean creatures we actually are, even if this is an anxious way to live
  • pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 68 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page