African Institute of Biomedical Science & Technology, Harare, Zimbabwe

For sustenance and writing inspiration:

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

“A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.” - Kenneth Burke (Permanence and Change)

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Emil Frankl, Austrian neurologist and the founder of logotherapy, a form of existential analysis

“L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” - “Le Petit Prince” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” - Albert Camus

“Art, as with science, ethics and policy making, is about seeing the invisible threads that run through things that are seemingly unrelated.” - Anonymous

Vaclav Havel, in Budapest, on Open Society (1999):

“An Open Society… requires an open human being with an open mind; and, by the same token, also generates and forms this kind of personality.”

“Reality is indeed ambiguous, and it is immensely difficult to always distinguish its different faces.”

“It is equally difficult to ascertain the boundaries between a number of other phenomena that are, in various ways, linked with the ideal of an Open Society… For example, how can we recognize the moment when a set of living ideas degenerates into an ideology? How can we recognize when principles, opinions and hopes begin to petrify into a rigid mass of dogma, precepts and conceptual stereotypes?

How can we recognize when interest in the truths of the world is being displaced by mere prestige and inordinate pride that do not allow a person to make even the slightest correction of a view that he, or she, has once expressed?

Where should we look for guidance?… There are no exact directions. There are probably no directions at all. The only things that I am able to recommend at this moment are: a sense of humour; an ability to see the ridiculous and the absurd dimensions of things; an ability to laugh about others as well as about ourselves; a sense of irony; and, of everything that invites parody in this world.

In other words: rising above things, or looking at them from a distance; sensibility to the hidden presence of all the more dangerous types of conceit in others, as well as in ourselves; good cheer; an unostentatious certainty of the meaning of things; gratitude for the gift of life and courage to assume responsibility for it; and, a vigilant mind.”

Other online resources of interest:

Visitor Information for Istanbul and Turkey

LINKS

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