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Photography captures, judges reality. Because by changing the place, time, angle we take pictures, we are changing the way the outer eye sees something. And because photography captures some kind of beauty, that comes to what is beauty? Is it the truth? Which then comes to what is the truth? By doing what we do with photographs, are we covering or uncovering?

Photographs is a copy of the past. A visual representation of our past. The sad thing is that once we see the horrible things in this way, we almost seem to have accepted it. Photography doesn’t tell you much, it’s true value is the story and context behind it. Photography is the way we see things, because a photo ultimately has an angle, things it hides. That then becomes another reality.

We want to be free, but being completely free is just another kind of responsibility. We blame the society for these barriers but they are in fact our own. Weight is a relative value, before experiencing heavy and light, we don’t know the weight. But life has no reference. Life is not relative to any other lives of that person. We are relative to others. Therefore, we interact with others in society.

Istanbul as the author described it, can be a very interesting or a very cruel and real place. The author himself was very imaginative and hated the non imaginative people, although it might just be the innocence of his age. Or it is just that the people of Istanbul was too caught up in this society rhythm that they forgot to step out once in a while.

Probably going to be the most challenging book I will read. Talked about how the liberation of the mind is to do nothing because our minds tend to convert real information into conventional knowledge that we understand. And along with the liberation of the mind, also the liberation of the body. Still needs to think......

Interesting so far. The firefighters are all brainwashed and found a way to convince themselves that government belief is their own beliefs. Similar to 1984 in many ways.

A shepherd lives the life of constant change. No restrains. Some are willing to live in their restrained little area, unwilling to change, to lose. But in life, we change as a trade for something else. We travel, uses time and energy and money. Because we would rather take a chance on the familiar. We need to take that first step.

The big changes in economy, epidemics, can all be understood with crowd psychology (if we understand what the crowd thinks, we can predict and understand its actions). However, the tipping point can not really be pin pointed, because crowd psychology is based on a lot of spontaneous changes. The civil rights movement's pinpoint is perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., but nobody would know when these people will appear.

The book is called "no more than skins", and its caption says, "the story carved in bones are questions we have to answer." The stories displayed examples of "rootless" people as I would like to call them. They have a home, but the true connections with these homes needs to be more than skins. You need to have the roots that you can come back to when all is lost.

I find it interesting when the child goes up to the rooftop. One time on his house and one time on top of the hospital. The book has the theme of absurdity. How these people all tried to grasp onto their meaning. The rooftop is where the child sees everything. Everything, yet nothing. Too much sometimes tells too less.

Little stories. Big ideas. First story already almost made me cry. I feel like this book contains a Chinese Spirit in some way. Facing problems head on, questions with answers that they just kind of knew in their bones.

I feel like the problem with society is that we know all these problems, but we don't necessarily use them to understand our own lives. I started thinking about my actions everyday in a new perspective. In the end, what does everything you learn mean if you don't even apply that knowledge for your life?

To understand someone, just asking for their own opinions proves very little. It is about how to create a deeper understanding from empirical data that we are really able to understand, and cure a person.
This books has talked about so much things, I can't summarise them all in the tiny updates. There is going to be a interesting review for this book...:)

Pretty interesting so far. I find his idea of contributing to our community being the meaning of life really interesting because I wrote some essays on this kind of thing and how humanity is this chain of support and how one side of us produces for others while if others are social animals like the producers, then they would also produce. And the producer enjoys the goods from the other producers...

The author is really digging into the inner essence of the pure color of white. He's not seeing the color, but knowing and understanding the color. The inner essence of white. White is nothing, but it resembles the birth of life and information from chaos. The creation for creation.

This hierarchy between the big kids and the small kids was very clear. While the little ones slaved away, the big ones had fun and blame it on the workers if things did happen. They were all working towards a goal, yet it seems like the big kids were just standing on the little kids for them to carry him towards the goal. Elements of horror are creeping in...

Science throughout the years, has a constant pattern which is breaking the pattern. With the same ideas passed on from generation to generation, it is easy to just go with the crowd, yet it's just these brilliant thinkers like Einstein who questions the authority that we are able to make progress. Science is not a culture that we keep, it is a constant strive for the real essence of universal laws.

Pretty interesting so far, coming back to this book after a while. Just from the few pages I’ve read right now, I can feel how brilliant this writer is. How he described the scenery to give people a certain feeling, how he described every tiny action, every dialogue... Excited to read this book!

People of religions generally don't like to be challenged. New ideas, true or not, once they shake the base of their beliefs, they feel threatened. It's never about truth or not, but what people choose to believe. Science is perhaps another form of religion. In this world, we can never be 100% sure of the things we have, but science gives better evidences, more "logos"- logic.

"The proles... were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another." The radical dictatorship of Big Brother and radical romanticism of Goldstein. The proles, innocent, which makes them harder to convince. They are loyal to their values, not ones of the country. While rebels like Winston lost their minds for their abstract romanticism.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." A true subject value is not enough, it's the power of a crowd belief that binds them together. The government alters facts and use the crowd psychology that the government is right. Truth was never told. These truths were used to maintain this cocoon. Once the butterfly is released, the ugly beings sees them as pests.

"... he was working hard because he wanted to learn English before Michael left the camp."
Living in a time of constant change can make yourself be ready for these changes. Getting hold of something. Get the most out of it, because you are always ready for it to be gone. Couples always believe they will be together forever so they live like they have too much time. You can never predict, but you can take precaution.

“Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had been once different?” In the story, the main character lives in a society of blind crowd, in cocoons of lies they wrapped themselves into. It’s like it was mentioned in the book “The Crowd”: the crowd is mostly blind, even for ones who are not, the government made sure that they fit in with the conformity.

Brilliant so far. Every tiny chapter of a few pages tells me so much about the world of 1984. Intense. Page turner.

For a person who didn’t know much about Chinese history, this book was surprisingly easy to understand. We also learnt about this in Social Studies last year, but this gave me much more details.