Keywords: Atmosphere
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Brian Matthews
- 08 May 2018
11 Comments
The word 'irony' is sometimes preceded by 'delicious'. But it is sour and wounding in Ireland, where British withdrawal from the EU, Brexit, and the Irish Republic's firm intention to remain, raises the possibility of what pundits call a 'hard' border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 19 April 2018
1 Comment
A grim and gripping tragedy on this personal level, as a whole Loveless functions also as a metaphor for political life in contemporary Russia. The fatal fracturing of its relationship with its neighbour Ukraine provides a backdrop and, for the degeneration of Zhengya and Boris' marriage and the resultant alienation of their son, a touchstone.
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AUSTRALIA
- Gillian Bouras
- 26 March 2018
11 Comments
The idea of cheating at sport, of setting such a bad example to the young, was quite simply unthinkable then, but now this cricketing episode, I fear, is a disgrace from which Australian sport may never recover. Something ethical, almost spiritual, has gone, and I am left with an acute sense of loss.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 03 December 2017
6 Comments
'The Three Wise Men' was published in the Herald newspaper in 1943. It is set in the jungle of New Guinea, and is about three Australian soldiers called Jack, Bill, and Fred. It is Christmas Eve, and Jack, Bill and Fred are lost 'in the middle of New Guinea in jungle as thick as the hairs on a dog.'
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ENVIRONMENT
- Francine Crimmins
- 19 September 2017
11 Comments
In a ball of fire, Cassini's 20-year journey across the solar system came to an abrupt finale last week. The spacecraft's odyssey soon revealed not 12 but 62 moons orbiting the gas giant. The most significant of these is Titan, which harbours large quantities of liquid water, considered to be essential to the existence of life. Meanwhile back on Earth ...
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 07 September 2017
2 Comments
Born a few months after Shelley drowned and desperate to understand the living Nature the Romantics had known, Matthew Arnold too found the natural world had gone silent. Where Wordsworth had heard 'strange utterance [in] the loud dry wind' and 'the sky seemed not a sky / Of earth - and with what motion moved the clouds', Arnold sadly concluded that 'the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light ...'
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RELIGION
- Tony Thompson
- 24 August 2017
14 Comments
I kept getting lost in Kolkata. North and south were somehow inverted in my head and I had to consciously avoid going the wrong way every time I stepped out of my hotel.
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ENVIRONMENT
To Tolkien, 'the long defeat' described the idea that so often in the world you find yourself fighting for a cause where there is very little chance of success, but you fight for it anyway because it is the right thing to do and because you can't imagine doing anything else. He paired this with the concept of eucatastrophe, a sudden and unexpected change of fortune for the better. Despondent climate activists do well to remember that the latter doesn't come without the former.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Penny Garnsworthy
- 19 June 2017
8 Comments
In 15th Century Japan a young man named Murata Shukou, who was studying for the priesthood, began to practice Zen philosophy. His teacher explained that the spirit of Zen was also present in the practice of tea-making, so Shukou began a journey of discovery into making and serving tea. There are almost 40 steps involved in this ancient ritual; time stops and I am mesmerised by the rhythm and the silence, as if I am separated from the world and nought exists save for the movement.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Greg Foyster
- 27 April 2017
14 Comments
I haven't flown for six years. I didn't feel a pressing need to travel, but most of all I didn't want to make such an enormous contribution to climate change. A return flight from Melbourne to London pumps about 1.8 tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, wiping out other efforts to reduce emissions at home. But now here I am on a Jetstar flight to Sydney for a climate change conference. As the plane takes off, I squirm with a sense of hypocrisy: I've broken my vow for the same reason I made it.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jena Woodhouse and Ian C. Smith
- 24 April 2017
2 Comments
Now, the forces of annihilation once again cohere, as if this were a valve in history's cardiac arrhythmia that faltered and unleashed a haemorrhage of horror, trauma, fear. The damask roses bloom unharvested in devastated fields. Their perfume cannot mask the stench that permeates the air, the atmosphere of dread, of mute despair. But when the juggernaut of war is redeployed elsewhere, the fragrant fields will come into their own, if there are hands to care.
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RELIGION
Last Sunday, I headed to a Buddhist temple in Springvale, in Melbourne's outer south-east. I wasn't going for a Songkran festival (Thai New Year), and it wasn't a regular part of my routine. I was going because my mother wanted to pray for her eldest sister, who had died on the Friday. My mother is a temple frequenter. I am not. But I was thankful for the immediacy with which she felt she was part of a worshipping community, even though she'd never before been to that particular temple.
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