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source: @pppollen on Twitter
Reblogged
You want to understand the world as well as you can, so you're always reading. You read thick academic books, books about science and technology, books where experiments, models, and data are used to produce hard, satisfying conclusions.
You've learned a lot by doing this, but you've also been wondering about the justification of science itself. You want to be certain that the results you've discovered are reliable and won't soon be replaced with entirely different conclusions.
So you start reading philosophy. Here the concerns seem more primary, more focused on the issue of what it is to be a subjective being trying to understand a world. You quickly find yourself reading not about science or its justifications, but about knowledge and its possible foundations. This feels necessary, for how else could you truly understand anything at all?
You want to be able to hold everything together at once. You want to see how the parts form a single, coherent whole. But the more you read, the more complex the problem of knowledge seems to be, and you're no longer certain there are any final answers. You keep reading and reading, but it doesn't feel like you're making any progress.
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“How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have? […] Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.”
— Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
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The wounded body is sacred in some deep level of its existence; it is a body specialized and formed by experience; in its new way of being present to the world, the wounded body gains something not possessed before. The wound is a gift; it may be a witness to a god or a goddess working in the wound.
Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh
Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we’ve worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it’s the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it’s the discovery of one’s own dispensability and perishability.
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia
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“We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.”
— Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
I have never felt any antagonism for or anxiety over the anarchy represented by the prevailing forms of art; on the contrary, I have always welcomed the dissolving influences. In an age marked by dissolution, liquidation seems to me a virtue, nay a moral imperative. Not only have I never felt the least desire to conserve, bolster up or buttress anything, but I might say that I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing
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We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.
To instead seek out what is impractical might seem almost quaint, as though it were for someone else — a different person living in a very different world. Sometimes we sense that there might be more to our lives than the practical, but this idea gets pushed out by the chorus of voices telling us to focus always on what's practical.
A consequence of this is that it can sound like madness to insist there are moments when we must completely ignore the practical. Yet it is precisely by going beyond the realm of the practical that we become capable of discovering another kind of value, a value that does not depend on this or that, a value that cannot be quantified because it is immeasurable.
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“There is still, upon having seen, the problem of conveying and comprehending it. I think we as a species really have “fallen,” in that we are very cut off, from Ma'at, from justice and order (and the voice of conscience telling us what is justice, what promotes order, what is truth); as Heraclitus said, we are stumbling around asleep, unable to see the logos (that which Ma'at through Ptah has built).”
— Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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Source: latex-salesman
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night
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“All the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions — news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas.”
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
