Gilbert Highet: A happy and valuable life he must have had.

Today I wish to give this little space to a beautiful mind: Gilbert Highet.
When at Uni, I found myself having to translate an abstract from The Mind of Man, written by this beautiful and wise man. I wish to share it with you. Enjoy!

Strange, unfathomable happiness: happiness of thinking, of seeking knowledge for its own sake. So much of our life is spent on solving problems to avoid immediate pain or to bring immediate profit; so much of our training aimed at bringing "practical" or "pragmatic" effects, designing and running machines, buying, selling, cooking, furnishing, investing, spending; so many worthy results attained by purposeful planning and directed thinking - that we forget how true and inexhaustible is the happiness of pure knowing. Everyone has tasted it. It is born in children. It goes to school with them, and is too often killed there by tired or "practical" teachers. But in some it survives, and unlike other delights it endures for the whole of life. To spend fifty or sixty years in stydying the structure of fishes, or the relation between logic and language, or the history of the Incas, or the routes of comets, or the geometry of non-Euclidean space, or the literature of Iceland, or the anatomy of the brain; to acquire and systemize and record new knowledge on any of these subjects without any expectation of benefiting mankind except by extending its range of understanding: that is to pass a happy and valuable life, usually tempered at the close by regret that another fifty years could not be added, in which to learn more, and still more. It is the purest and least selfish satisfaction known to man, except those of creating a work of art and healing the sick. And it is, as Aristotele said, to share the activity of God Himself: his eternal life of pure contemplation.

Briga

Ejemplo de Spanglish

Pepe, mi querido "flatmate" me dejò esta nota en cima de la mesa de la cocina, grande ejemplo de "Spanglish"!

Darling, me atrevì a pedirle la money para el puto vicio a Sebastian (big boy). Cuando regrese nos pondremos ciegos. Pepe

Homage to guinness!

Guinness is one of my favourite beers and since I left London I miss it a lot. This is my tribute to it!

Requiem