For joy and sorrow: DoubleQuotes in the Wild
[ by Charles Cameron — without access to joy, how shall we carry the burdens of despair? ]
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DoubleQuotes are juxtapositions that have a powerful impact. Our minds and hearts are drawn naturally to seeing parallels and contradictions, making comparisons between ideas and creative leaps from one idea to another, and since this is a very basic human cognitive ability, I’ve developed my own DoubleQuotes format for presenting striking juxtapositions, and use it frequently in my posts here at Zenpundit. But I also collect strong examples of such juxtapositions when others make them, and call them DoubleQuotes in the Wild.
Today, I’d like to double up on my wild DoubleQuotes, and having offered you Jimi Hendrix (graffito juxtaposed with tree, above) to bring you joy, now offer you the poignant example from a Serbian Orthodox monk (Aleppo, Syria, then and now, below) to bring you sorrow:
Tragedy of the civil war in #Syria in two pictures which say more than many words. Photos of the #Aleppo market pic.twitter.com/SHL1t9oS3r
— Sava Janjic (@SavaJanjic) September 5, 2013
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Music, munitions — we may think them unequal combatants, yet as von Clausewitz puts it:
One might say that the physical seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade.
— or in somewhat more recent terms, as Michael Herr noted in his book Dispatches:
Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we’d bring records, sounds were as precious as water: Hendrix, the Airplane, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, all the things that hadn’t even started when we’d left the States.
… sounds … as precious as water …
