Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
After all, language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?
The red zone is nearly twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, and four times larger than Hagley Park, which used to be Christchurch's largest public space. An area that large, so full of emotional and physical weight, should be unavoidable and confronting, but it's easy to forget it's there. Roads don't go into the red zone anymore, so you have to seek it out on foot or by bicycle, or catch a glimpse of it from above as you fly in or out of the city, a sprawling green bruise, shocking in its scale.
It’s taken the better part of a decade to answer one simple question: What should be done with this land? In the search for an answer, the red zone has found its own path, in what has been an unusual experiment in how life moves on after humans have left.
Just like you must accept dream logic when you're sleeping, you must accept The Incompletes for what it is, to allow the endless descriptions of rooms, city streets, broken televisions, the cold, peeling walls and dirty window panes, to take hold of you. In the end you'll stumble out of the book, a bit dazed, wondering what the hell you just read, but it's an enjoyable trek if you like beautiful sentences — and you're one of those scene viewers I mentioned.
Mrs. Gurdon is the most affirmative and least prescriptive of writers, but she becomes justly more emphatic in her urgings to continue reading rituals even after children grow older. The sacrifice in time, she writes, is “an obstinate act of love,” and the rewards of sharing “Oliver Twist” or “The Call of the Wild” (to name two of my childhood favorites) are incalculable—not least for the grown-ups, who are granted the gift of putting their voices “in service of beautiful writing.” When we read aloud, we become the book.
Iger’s book, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” contains insider detail about how he painstakingly guided the acquisition of animation powerhouse Pixar from Steve Jobs, then persuaded George Lucas to entrust Disney with his “Star Wars” franchise. Readers also learn about his role in the deal to buy 20th Century Fox studios from entertainment mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Yet even after 246 pages of those and other dramatic scenes, Iger seems to have left one rather large elephant standing in the room. More about that in a moment.
Mr. Mauriès, the author of more than 40 books on a variety of subjects from Jean Cocteau to Chanel, is a purist, an aesthete with a rigid sense of ethics. His impeccable taste is reflected in the lavish illustrations of cabinets of curiosities ranging from Renaissance collector Ulisse Aldrovandi’s teatro di natura in Bologna to contemporary artist Daniel Spoerri’s ongoing “Musée sentimental” in Paris, Cologne and other places. And Mr. Mauriès’s ethical standards shape the story he tells us, in which the only acceptable cabinets of curiosities are those that reflect some kind of larger truth, in which the macrocosmic becomes the microcosmic and the ineffable splendor of the universe emanates from the tiniest sea-shell added to a museum built mostly for the pleasure of its owner.