Montagnes du Djurdjura _ Djurdjura Moutains .. Algeria

 

Martyrs Memorial _ Maqam Shahid

The Martyrs Memorial (Maquam E' chahid) is an iconic concrete monument commemorating the Algerian war for independence. The monument was opened in 1982 on the 20th anniversary of Algeria's independence. It is fashioned in the shape of three standing palm leaves which shelter the 'Eternal Flame' beneath. At the edge of each palm leaf stands a statue of a soldier, each representing a stage of Algeria's struggle.

THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE ღ

Chapter I

In the morning of life came a good fairy with her basket, and said:

"Here are gifts. Take one, leave the others. And be wary, chose wisely; oh, choose wisely! for only one of them is valuable."

The gifts were five: Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure, Death. The youth said, eagerly:

"There is no need to consider"; and he chose Pleasure.

He went out into the world and sought out the pleasures that youth delights in. But each in its turn was short-lived and disappointing, vain and empty; and each, departing, mocked him. In the end he said: "These years I have wasted. If I could but choose again, I would choose wisely."

Chapter II

The fairy appeared, and said:

"Four of the gifts remain. Choose once more; and oh, remember-- time is flying, and only one of them is precious."

The man considered long, then chose Love; and did not mark the tears that rose in the fairy's eyes.

After many, many years the man sat by a coffin, in an empty home. And he communed with himself, saying: "One by one they have gone away and left me; and now she lies here, the dearest and the last. Desolation after desolation has swept over me; for each hour of happiness the treacherous trader, Love, as sold me I have paid a thousand hours of grief. Out of my heart of hearts I curse him."

Chapter III

"Choose again." It was the fairy speaking.

"The years have taught you wisdom--surely it must be so. Three gifts remain. Only one of them has any worth--remember it, and choose warily."

The man reflected long, then chose Fame; and the fairy, sighing, went her way.

Years went by and she came again, and stood behind the man where he sat solitary in the fading day, thinking. And she knew his thought:

"My name filled the world, and its praises were on every tongue, and it seemed well with me for a little while. How little a while it was! Then came envy; then detraction; then calumny; then hate; then persecution. Then derision, which is the beginning of the end. And last of all came pity, which is the funeral of fame. Oh, the bitterness and misery of renown! target for mud in its prime, for contempt and compassion in its decay."

Chapter IV

"Chose yet again." It was the fairy's voice.

"Two gifts remain. And do not despair. In the beginning there was but one that was precious, and it is still here."

"Wealth--which is power! How blind I was!" said the man. "Now, at last, life will be worth the living. I will spend, squander, dazzle. These mockers and despisers will crawl in the dirt before me, and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy. I will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of the spirit, all contentments of the body that man holds dear. I will buy, buy, buy! deference, respect, esteem, worship--every pinchbeck grace of life the market of a trivial world can furnish forth. I have lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore, but let that pass; I was ignorant then, and could but take for best what seemed so."

Three short years went by, and a day came when the man sat shivering in a mean garret; and he was gaunt and wan and hollow-eyed, and clothed in rags; and he was gnawing a dry crust and mumbling:

"Curse all the world's gifts, for mockeries and gilded lies! And miscalled, every one. They are not gifts, but merely lendings. Pleasure, Love, Fame, Riches: they are but temporary disguises for lasting realities--Pain, Grief, Shame, Poverty. The fairy said true; in all her store there was but one gift which was precious, only one that was not valueless. How poor and cheap and mean I know those others now to be, compared with that inestimable one, that dear and sweet and kindly one, that steeps in dreamless and enduring sleep the pains that persecute the body, and the shames and griefs that eat the mind and heart. Bring it! I am weary, I would rest."

Chapter V

The fairy came, bringing again four of the gifts, but Death was wanting. She said:

"I gave it to a mother's pet, a little child. It was ignorant, but trusted me, asking me to choose for it. You did not ask me to choose."

"Oh, miserable me! What is left for me?"

"What not even you have deserved: the wanton insult of Old Age."


Mark Twain 

:-)

“People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a 

symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. 


Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our   lives and our souls, which are as unique as 

fingerprints in every way.” 

― Ashly Lorenzana

Let me not say I love you By Beth Hammontree

Let Me Not Say I Love You
by Beth Hammontree
Let me not say I love you, Although you know that it is true. That phrase has been so much abused, Misunderstood and over-used. Let me say rather "I think you, Breathe you, taste you, feel you, dream you," That you help make each day complete, And life has never been so sweet.

Architecture of the Self

“The most incredible architecture
Is the architecture of Self,
which is ever changing, evolving, revolving and has unlimited beauty and light inside which radiates outwards for everyone to see and feel. 

With every in breathe
you are adding to your life
and every out breathe you are releasing what is not contributing to your life.
Every breathe is a re-birth.”

Cayenne Pepper

"Cayenne should be an herb which everyone has in the kitchen, the bathroom and in the trunk of your car...Because there is no other herb that moves the blood faster to the brain than cayenne. ...It relieves the pain of angina pectoris by helping to get more blood to the heart muscle itself. And if a person has a heart attack, Cayenne is the surest first-aid remedy...I have had almost a hundred patients actually save their lives by using a tablespoon of Cayenne pepper in a glass of warm water and drinking it down fast." 

Dr Richard Shulze, N.D., M.H.

Is your sandwich tasty or sour?

“Life is like a sandwich!

Birth as one slice,
and death as the other.
What you put in-between 
the slices is up to you.

Is your sandwich tasty or sour?

”seeing is believing ”

" Some people reject the concept of God because they feel, as it has been said,

”seeing is believing.” However, in their daily life they acknowledge the existence of many

things that cannot be seen, such as air, gravity, radio or television waves, electricity,

magnetism, and the Big Bang. We have not seen the Big Bang, but there are evidences

that it happened. We have not seen radio waves, but there are evidences that they exist.

Similarly, there is no physical way to see or subject God to human analysis, but there

are overwhelming evidences that He exists. The irony is that some people accept the

existence of the unseen waves or electricity based upon evidences, but they refuse to

apply the same standard to God.

Consider two living beings such as a tiny ant and a huge elephant, do you think

that the ant can see or measure the size of the elephant. Does the ant have any way of

knowing exactly what the elephant is doing all the time? Even if the ant knows what the

elephant is doing at one time, does it know why? It is the arrogance of some people that

prevents them from admitting that they are so tiny with limited senses and knowledge.

The ant may realize that it is limited to comprehend the existence and size of the

elephant, but some people think that they have unlimited senses that they have to see or

measure God to believe."

WHY IS THERE EVIL?

“It is said that evil in the world is like the shaded spaces in a painting; if you come close to it you’ll see these as defects, but if you draw back to a distance you will discover the shaded areas are necessary in fulfilling an aesthetic function within the artwork.”

If there weren’t any starving people how could we show our generosity?

How else can one appreciate goodness without having experienced hardship to use as a comparator? Would it be possible to appreciate good health if illness did not occur?

 There is an ancient wisdom that states :  “Out of the snakes poison comes the antidote”

Wisdom

"Allah endowed angels with intellect without desire,


 animals with desire without intellect 


and man with both of them. So he whose intellect manages 


to conquer his desire,


is greater  than the angels, and he whose desires overcome 


his intellect, is lower than the animals."

Your love Should never be offered to the mouth of a Stranger

Your love

Should never be offered to the mouth of a

Stranger,

Only to someone

Who has the valor and daring

To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife

Then weave them into a blanket


To protect you.
















Hafiz

Thought-provoking quotes by the Egyptian satirical writer Galal Amer

 “It is a society that does not care for the hungry unless he is a voter, or the naked unless it was a woman.”

The life of the citizen has become very difficult as he must protect his life from thugs as well as protect his mind from politicians."
“أصبحت مهمة المواطن صعبة فعليه أن يحافظ على حياته من البلطجية وأن يحافظ على عقله من السياسيين”


“حقوق الإنسان: هو حق المواطن في ألا يتم إهانته إلا تحت إشراف ضابط”
“Human Rights: the right of a citizen not to be humiliated except under the supervision of a police officer.”


When Rousseau spoke of separation of powers, we told him our society has a different nature. We prefer to ‘combine’ the powers because the executive power is afraid of sleeping alone.”


“We are very democratic. Our discussions begin with an exchange of opinions on politics and economics, and end with an exchange of opinions on our mothers and fathers.”

“You have no right to look forward to having an important position in your country. Similar to the bus seats, these are designated only for older people.

"Tragedy is more important than love."

Tragedy is a precious word. We use it to confer dignity and value on violence, catastrophe, agony, and bereavement. ‘Tragedy’ claims that this death is exceptional. Yet these supposedly special fatalities are

in our ears and eyes every day, on the roads, in the skies, out there in foreign lands and right here at home, the latest bad news.

Is the word now bandied around so freely that it has lost all meaning?

Do our conceptions of tragedy have any real connection with those of the ancient Greeks, with whom it originated two and half thousand years ago as the description of a particular kind of drama?

How did tragedy migrate from the Greeks to Shakespeare and Racine, from drama to other art forms, from fiction to real events?

Though its origins are shrouded in obscurity, ‘tragedy’ first emerged into the light in Athens around 533 bc with the actor Thespis (from whom we get ‘thespian’= actor ). It enjoyed a long high noon through the

following century, from which a handful of masterpieces have survived in their entirety, seven attributed to Aeschylus, seven to Sophocles and 19 to Euripides, the great trio of playwrights.

Sophocles alone is said to have composed 130 – and it’s sobering to realize what a small fraction has come down to us. The honour of having their work performed at the Festival of the Great Dionysia was restricted

to three dramatists selected to compete for the prize of ‘best tragic poet’. Each had to supply three tragedies and a satyr play, a grotesquely comic after-piece featuring a chorus of satyrs

(half-man and half-beast), of which only one complete example, the Cyclops of Euripides, has survived. There were other competitions for comedy and dithyramb (a form of choral song).

Special occasions, special people: tragedy portrayed the fate of famous men and women – legends such as Oedipus and Medea – in elevated style and language. The word ‘tragedy’ seems to be derived from two Greek words, for ‘goat’ and ‘song’. Nobody quite knows why. Was the goat once a prize?

Later commentators thought the goat expressed a truth about the fall of great men, who look good to begin with but end up badly. Just like a goat, said Francesco da Buti in 1395, who has ‘a prince-like look in the front (horns and beard) but a rear end that is filthy and naked’, and Giovanni da Serravalle a few years

later, going one better: ‘for a goat has a beautiful aspect, but when it passes it gives off a mighty stink from its tailquarters’.

"We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look."

--Aldous Huxley

"I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life.

They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them."

--Juliette Binoche

 

Many people do not see the point to tragedy. Much of American pop culture tends to embrace the comic vision of art, finding tragedy depressing or disturbing. However, in the 5th century B.C.E., the classical Greek writers thought that facing tragedy was a healthy and necessary antidote to human foolishness. It taught humans to know themselves in a way comedy could not. The Greek philosopher Plato, quoting Socrates, admonished his listeners, "Know thyself." Part of that is how we might react in a tragic situation similar to what the protagonist faces.

 

"Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that

brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans'

suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort

others"

--C. S. Lewis

Likewise, the Romantic poets and later Victorian viewers valued tragedy as an emotional exercise helping viewers learn compassion. Watching people suffer on stage could help the audience sympathize with

another's pain. The rise of the sentimental novel in the late 1700s and early 1800s reveals a cultural interest in this process, and Romantic poets like Shelley, Byron, and Keats went into ecstasies over Shakespeare. Their poetic works are perhaps a distant cousin to the great tragic dramas of earlier years.

"If a single person dies in front of you, it is a tragedy. If a million people die on the

other side of the earth, it is a statistic."

--Josef Stalin

So what exactly counts as a literary tragedy? What does not? Comedians jokingly refer to tragedy as "the

plays in which everybody dies." But the genre is more complex than that. Many plays, movies, and stories contain death, violence, and unhappy endings. Though depressing, these traits do not make a tragedy per se.

The classical definition comes from Aristotle:

"Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain

magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several

kinds being found in separate parts of the play . . . through pity and fear effecting the

proper purgation of these emotions."

--Aristotle, The Poetics

The word catharsis (translated  as "purgation") implies that tragedy purges, removes, or unclogs negative emotions such as pity and fear that build up within the human spirit. Thus, watching a tragedy might be a sort of psychological Draino. However, the word catharsis can also be translated as "purification," implying that somehow tragedy purifies pity and fear, turns them into something healthy or good. Catharsis can also mean "distillation," the sense that purifying something involves concentrating it into a more potent form. Somehow tragedy takes all these negative emotions people feel and intensifies them. Depending upon how you translate that single word, the purpose and definition of tragedy varies greatly.

 

The first component of tragedy is the tragic hero. In traditional Greek drama, the hero must be somebody of great social importance--a prince or ruler or hero far removed from the everyday Joe-onthe-street. The tragic hero had to be someone basically likeable; he had to have traits that the audience admired. Often, it is this same admirable trait that causes the hero's downfall. For example, we admire Macbeth initially for his ambitious, go-get-'em attitude. His up-and-at-'em philosophy takes Macbeth to glorious heights in the military. However, the same trait causes his ethical and political self-destruction when he plots to kill his liege lord. In the same way, we may admire the passion in Romeo and Juliet's young romance, but that same inability to live apart results in their messy double-suicide. We admire Brutus for his patriotic concern for Rome, but it is that same love of country that leads him into betraying his best friend. At some point, the hero falls from glory. His own hubris, his own desire to reach beyond what is possible, ensures such a fall.

Tragedy also involves a weird mixture of personal choice and fate. To be a tragedy, the hero must have personal choice and agency. If a teenager is shot at random in a drive-by shooting, his death does not count as a literary tragedy because the victim did nothing to bring such misfortune upon himself. He had no choice in the matter. Such a death can only be fashioned into tragedy if the subject makes some kind of personal or moral decision. The decision (always made out of free will) then results in a chain of unstoppable and unforeseen negative events. That sudden shift from upward glory to tragic decline is called the peripetea. After the peripetea, the hero confronts social forces so huge and irresistible the tragedy seems like the hand of fate.

Another important component of tragedy is anagnorisis. For the tragedy to meet the bill, the hero must realize his mistake and its horrible results. If a character never understands what occurred and why, the result may be brute suffering, but that does not constitute tragedy in the literary sense.
  Part of the pain a tragic hero must face is his own realization of personal culpability and error. However, that new insight always comes too late for him to change the coming disaster. By the time Macbeth realizes his approaching downfall, he has become a hollow shell of humanity, devoid of former ethics, and he cannot wash the blood from his hands. By the time Brutus realizes the ultimate results of Caesar's assassination, Julius' adopted heir has already claimed the imperial scepter and roused the mob against the assassins. Anagnorisis refers to the moment of tragic recognition, in which the truth, especially a universal or transcendent Truth-with-a-capital-T, reveals itself to the hero.

"What makes a tragedy so tragic is not that the noble individual falls into ruin, but that

his fall causes so much suffering in others."

--Charmezel Dudt.

Finally, tragedy spirals out behind the hero himself. Not only does he suffer, his choice inflicts misery upon other innocent people, and he knows it.
The error may be King Lear's, but Cordelia is the one hanged. Romeo and Juliet made the choice, but Tibalt and Mercutio also die. Tragedy is when a noble individual's poor choice destroys that admirable individual and also causes suffering, pain, and death to others he holds dear.
The interest lies in how the hero reacts to this knowledge. How does he respond to the no-win situation resulting from his earlier choices? Macbeth responds with nearly psychotic fatalism. Othello with grieving tears. Hamlet with long overdue action.