Day 7

Another sunny day w/o TV: long bike ride; read some & prowled sites for a school project; made the leap from yahoo to gmail & reignited contact with long lost friends; and rescued a new lamp from the junk room in my building's basement. I might've done all that anyway, regardless of my fatwa against TV. But somehow the course of the day had a richer texture than I imagine it would've had, had I been glued to the news (or whatever) in between bursts of engagement.

A friend of mine wrote me and mentioned that she's reading The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art by E.H. Gombrich. I poked around and stumbled upon an excerpt of the book where he offers a line from Cicero:

The very things that move our sense most to pleasures and appeal to them most speedily at first are the ones from which we are most quickly estranged by a kind of disgust and surfeit.