Holy yas!
124 karma · joined March 21, 2014
Those of you who are new to this, Qawwali is predominantly south asian genre that is centuries old. My goal with this website is more like wiki, or a gateway for anyone wanting to get introduced to the genre. One of the main, and the complex feature that i worked on was building family trees/lineages. https://www.qavvali.com/
EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/
I have been actively working on it, and sticking to one thing and just starting, but i am a creature of habit and love hoarding and finding resources.
I love Dostoevsky too much and am quite happy in my bias and echo chamber of that—he was one of the writers that I read in my early days, and to date, I feel that he changed a lot in me or resonated so much that I can't explain.
I believe Nietzche said this about him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."
And one of my favorite quotes by him:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
I wonder if euphemisms have some metaphorical overloading that changes over the time, or so.
“I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” - Pessoa
“Just as some people work because they’re bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. Daydreaming, which occurs naturally to people when they’re not thinking, in me takes written form, for I know how to dream in prose. And there are many sincere feelings and much genuine emotion that I extract from not feeling”
- Fernando Pessoa
“I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I’ve never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I’ve always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn’t tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn’t live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.”
Fernando Pessoa
There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.
Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing. Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life; they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis.
What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation..”
Excerpt from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa