If a lighthouse could think, it might marvel at how all the light in the world focused its beam on it. For us humans, it often feels the same. Since we can only see what is in our field of vision, hear what is in earshot and touch what is within reach, it is natural to feel that we are more at the centre of things than we objectively are. Whether you are in the spotlight or you are the spotlight, everything centres on you.
ReadSome find our increased reliance on mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything?
ReadI don’t think we can maintain a strict division between personal and professional life any more. The boundaries are blurring because we quite rightly no longer accept that business is business, and nothing more.
ReadFiennes’s inner psyche appears to be not so much a closed book as a blank page. It’s not that Fiennes, now 70, isn’t a charming and engaging conversationalist. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to do introspection and says he’s bad at “hypotheses or inward-looking philosophy”. Ask him a question that invites him to look inwards, and he answers it with a story about something he has done. It is as though for him Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the active and contemplative life is absolute.
ReadToo often we think only about what we want to say, and not enough about how we are likely to be heard and understood.
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