John Cousins Livres

"Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain." - Jack London Write Ideas . Michel Foucault called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat.” A Common Place Book is a quaint name for a journal. Journaling is the most important habit you can cultivate for personal growth. Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge. Its a personal repository of stuff you come across and find interesting. By writing the information in a book, you are more likely to remember it and you have a record of it to refer to. Its a scrapbook. Fill with whatever catches your quotes, poems, ideas, proverbs, thoughts, dreams, recipes. Its a mosaic of your mind and interests. Its a place where you can make connections over time and reveal yourself to you. Its a cognitive net that catches fleeting thoughts that otherwise recede and vanish. Its your autobiography. Try it. It will change your life."You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy."― Lemony Snicket

John Psathas has said that, of all New Zealand composers, John Cousins has `thrown the spear furthest', meaning he is one of our most original artists, going beyond the edge. Provocative and penetrating and fundamentally true, Cousins remains absorbed and energised in and by creative work. On the conversations, talks and reflections gathered in this volume, John Cousins speaks of landscape, family, himself, and shares a musical vision of consolation and hope. John Cousins was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1943. He received training as a musician, graduating with an honours degree in music from the University of Canterbury in 1965, and taught there from 1967 to 2004. Over the years his work has evolved from conventional musical composition to sculptural performance, mixed-media and sonic art, and has been performed, broadcast and exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Europe, Russia and the USA.

This book is the product of inspiration and motivation. The inspiration came in night visions upon my bed, when the Lord revealed to me events that shall shortly come to pass, beginning with the rapture of His Church, when Christ shall appear in the clouds and take his chosen people, those in the grave and those alive, to live with him in Heaven forever. "For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who are alive and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air." But alas, soon after the rapture, there will be widespread universal unrest, lawlessness and destruction, resulting in the utter breakdown of governments throughout the world during a period designated the great tribulation. Therefore, the motivation for this work, shrouded in allegory, is to inform, to caution and exhort all who may read it, to prepare to meet our God. Because the rapture will usher in a period of darkness, famine, hunger and out-of-control violence, a world in which men shall seek death but death itself will flee from them. One such symbol is that of the rider of the pale horse. "And I looked and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him."