The School of Life

Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Connections

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time.

They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.

So, forget Jesus.

The stars died so that you could be here today."

 Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona University, will lead our next sermon on Sunday 16 October, to show how each of us is connected to the cosmos in ways we’d never imagine. From the stardust we’re made of, to the atoms we breathe, to the curving of space time that governs the way we make our way through traffic jams, to time travel itself. Ordinary life just isn’t that ordinary.

For more information and to book tickets please go to: www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Lawrence-Krauss-on-Cosmic-Connections

John-Paul Flintoff on Being Consumed by Ruskin

Have you caught on to the Ruskin revival yet? All of a sudden, it seems that the Victorian artist, critic and revolutionary thinker has become interesting again.

Emma Thompson is making a film about Ruskin's five-year marriage to Effie Gray, who ran off with Ruskin's protege, the pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais (who painted this portrait  of Ruskin before that unfortunate turn of events).

Nobody has ever quite understood what caused the marriage to fail. Some argue, not without evidence, that Ruskin was unable to accept his wife's having pubic hair. It remains to be seen how Thompson, and her husband Greg Wise, who plays Ruskin in her film, will handle this mystery. But to suggest that Ruskin's failed marriage is the most important thing about him is like saying that the point to remember about Socrates was that he wore sandals.

Ruskin was an extraordinary thinker whose ideas were influential throughout the British empire and beyond. He championed many great artists – not just the pre-Raphaelites but also – at a key point in his early career - William Mallord Turner. He substantially inspired the arts and crafts movement founded by William Morris. His observations about the natural world opened the way for environmentalists.

And he wrote and lectured widely to lecture on social justice. Tolstoy described Ruskin as one of the most remarkable men, “not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times”. And not long after Ruskin died, Gandhi read one of his essays on a long train journey - and said it cast a "magic spell" that changed his life.

 

Join us for our next Conversation Meal: Dine with Ruskin on Monday 12 September 2011 19.30-22.30. The evening will be hosted by writer and faculty member John Paul Flintoff and will take place at The Saatchi Gallery.

 

Richard Reynolds on his stuggle to fill the world with flowers

I began guerrilla gardening four years ago. These strikes were solo nocturnal missions. My aim was to make myself a garden from the miserable and neglected flowerbeds abandoned by Southwark Council's horticultural contractors. In parallel, little did I know, but thousands of others were doing the same, taking land that was not theirs and cultivating it, for flowers and food, alone and in groups, in cities and in country lanes. 

A lot has happened since I began guerrilla gardening and it's all because I blogged about it. So here I am blogging some more to tell you about The School of Life's wonderful Guerrilla Gardening gift box (seen here), which contains all you need for a night out transforming some orphaned land into a little garden.

It also contains a copy of my recent book, ON GUERRILLA GARDENING, which BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time picked as one of their Top 5 gardening books for Christmas: "I'd go as far as to say it's one of the most unusual gardening books of 2008, well written, well researched, very inspiring". Unfortunately praise for guerrilla gardening is not universal and the fight continues on the doorstep... my local council (Southwark) have just pressed the big red nuclear button and declared war on my oldest guerrilla garden. The bombshell arrived in the form of an invoice to me and my 89 neighbours for gardening they have not been doing. Last year they refunded their fraudulent charge for three years of 'grounds maintenance' after admitting the work had been done by guerrilla gardeners. But now they have reinstated the charge without explanation. Read more about this farcical saga at www.guerrillagardening.org.

Richard takes participants on The School of Life’s PLAY course out for a beginners’ guerrilla gardening lesson. Book now for the course starting on 2 February.

He is also leading an Urban Gardening Holiday for The School of Life in collaboration with Emma Townshend in April 2009. Find out more or book a place HERE.

To order The Guerrilla Gardening Christmas Gift Box for £35 plus post and packaging, click HERE.

Sophie Howarth on Trees and Knowledge

As those who have visited The School of Life will know, we are rather partial to trees. And so it seems are the editors of Hamish Hamilton’s new online journal Five Dials which has just released its second issue, downloadable here. Five Dials isn’t strictly themed: ‘our themes, like rotting oak, break down, crumble and biodegrade halfway through each planned issue’ they admit. But the new issue features articles by the late Roger Deakin, Robert McFarlane and Jay Griffiths among others, so one could say it has more than a hint of the natural world about it.

'Everywhere in the world, people have associated tree and thought, idea and forest,’ Griffiths writes in her beautiful article Ancient Trees, Ancient Knowledge. ‘For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind, and your sense of kin - your social mind. The Malo people of northern Bangladesh used to have a custom of marrying a girl to a tree and a boy to the river, before their marriage to each other. For the Karen in the forests of northern Thailand, the umbilical cord of a baby would be tied to a tree; the spirit of the child dwelt there, and to harm the tree would be to harm the child; the ritual thus intricately linked person to tree.' Read the rest of the article here.

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.