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Staring 'into the eyes of the Great Magician' Well hello 2010! A new year, a new blog. Where to start? As I mean to go on I suppose... with an unedited, unstructured, perhaps unintelligible stream of consciousness, because the primary purpose of...

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Ignorance = Blogging Bliss? I often think that if I had better knowledge of psychology, sociology, history etc. I'd have been better qualified to address the issues I've raised in the Rabbit so far. But yesterday, after writing my...

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Hit Pause on 'Perfection' A music-specific continuation from Jan 26 ('The Problems of an Ideal Rabbit'): For me and many others, one of the main and eternal aspirations of a musician is to break down the physical and mental...

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The Joy of Laundry Yesterday I sat in a laundromat for a good chunk of the afternoon. Understandably, I expected it to be a fairly brain-numbing and/or depressing experience. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I started...

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The Silent Musician This afternoon I sat in an orchestra rehearsal in my normal place but, because of injury, without my cello. Even though the rehearsal did, of course, have my undivided attention, I started thinking about...

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The Rabbit from ‘Sophie’s World’

“If a newborn baby could talk, it would probably say something about what an extraordinary world it had come into. We see how it looks around and reaches out in curiosity to every thing it sees… But long before the child learns how to talk properly – and long before it learns to think philosophically – the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me… A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty. In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is how he did it. But when it comes to the world it’s somewhat different. We know that the world is not all a sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are part of something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works…. As far as the rabbit is concerned, it might be better to compare it with the whole universe. We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit’s fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician’s eyes.”

~ Letter from Albert Knox to Sophie, Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder