Week 10. Re: Read & Decorate

“Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.” (Roland Barthes, S/Z) These words were admittedly meant for quite different texts from what we are reading. Still I feel that they are relevant for what we are doing: By reading the texts over and over again, we are able to see…

Week 9. The Mozart Effect

Q: What do you get when you drop a piano down a mineshaft? As a rule, it’s been claimed, we use the left brain hemisphere to understand language and the right one to understand music. A 1993 study showed that listening to Mozart while taking a spatial reasoning test enhances the performance, at least for…

Week 8. Shipbuilding

I don’t know how well known the history of the Swedish warship Vasa is outside Scandinavia, so I’ll give you a brief summary: In 1625 the Swedish king Gustav II Adolph ordered the building of four new warships. One of them was to be the Swedish fleet’s flagship, the biggest and most expensive ship ever…

Week 7. Heavy Mental Diet

No negative thoughts, right? Or at least chase them away when they pop up. Who could have known it was so difficult? I for one had to start over and over again (which I later understood was a mistake – I’ll write more about that later). This week has been filled with small setbacks but…

Week 6. R. W. Emerson’s Philosophy: Monism or Dualism?

I’m struggling with Emerson. Not because his words are difficult or his sentences are long. What I’m trying to grasp is his philosophical position: Was he an idealist? That’s easy: He definitely was. He believed, like Haanel, that mind was the cause of matter. Or … no, I’m not so sure about that. It’s been…

Supplement: Musical samples

Hi, it’s Erik Galliano Olsen again. Though I’m sure you all know The Start, it is interesting to hear the old demo version where his friend Petros is singing the lead voice. The sax is played by Thanasis, and if you listen carefully, you will detect a female voice, sung by Matina, in the short…

Nostos: Finding the Ithaca inside yourself

Espen Hagerup interviewed by Erik Galliano Olsen, Lardos, Rhodes, September 2020 Espen Hagerup greets me with a hug in his home in Lardos, a village a few kilometres west of Lindos, Rhodes. We sit down in his lovely garden where a lemon tree is lifting its branches in one of the corners while an orange…

Week 5. I Am a Camera

There’s a graffiti on the wall of the school in my street saying ΧΡΥΣΗ ΑΥΓΗ, meaning Golden Dawn, which is the name of the Greek fascist party. I won’t tell you what I think about them, but I had to laugh when somebody had changed it to ΧΡΥΣΑ ΑΥΓΑ, meaning golden eggs. Maybe it was…

Week 4. It’s not about the size

This week we’ve got several new promises to keep. One of them is to always bring a small gift when we meet people. A line from an old song popped up in my head: Great gifts are guiles and look for gifts again, My trifles come, as treasures from my mind The peddler in John…

Week 3: Fearless

I want to tell you about a friend. She may look frail and tender, but in fact she’s stronger than anyone I know. For two years she worked as a particle physicist at CERN. While she was working on her PhD in Rio de Janeiro, she decided to quit this promising career and become a…