Architecture is only a movie

After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie; an un-habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom for the fascination of the mobs, where the light of vehicular speed (audiovisual and automobile) renews the glare of solar light; the city is no longer a theatre (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights: they've returned to Ur (Our, light), believing now that the desert is without horizon.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 65

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

Art is the presentation of the illusion of the world

The world is an illusion, and art is the presentation of the illusion of the world.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) pp. 35-36

The desert of uncertainty and effort

The Hebraic tradition manifests two kinds of lack, expressed by two deserts, emerging one from the other, heart of everything, in its heart everything. One is named Shemama, despair and destruction, and the other is Midbar, which is a desert not of dereliction but instead a field of uncertainty and effort. The shemama is, rather, polarity of the City-State (City of Ur – Our, light), its desert is the tragical one of laws, ideology, order, as opposed to what could have resulted from wandering.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 27

The mind is a thing that lasts

To Descartes' sentence: "the mind is a thing that thinks", Bergson retorted: "The mind is a thing that lasts..." The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: it's our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 22

There is no longer a reason

Metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition – that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response 'for no reason' is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like 'Where do we come from?', 'Why do we exist?', we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies 'From nothing. For nothing' really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions – and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 110

Chance is a physical law

If from one throw to the next the dice imploded, or became flat or spherical, or if gravity ceased to operate and they flew off into the air, or on the contrary, were projected underground, etc., then there would be no aleatory sequence, and it would be impossible to establish a calculus of probabilities. Thus chance always presupposes some form of physical invariance – far from permitting us to think the contingency of physical laws, chance itself is nothing other than a certain type of physical law – one that is 'indeterministic'.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 99

Contradiction

Let us suppose that a contradictory entity existed – what could happen to it? Could it lapse into non-being? But it is contradictory, so that even if it happened not to be, it would still continue to be even in not-being, since this would be in conformity with its paradoxical 'essence'. [...] Such an entity would be tantamount to a 'black hole of differences', into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be other than it.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 69-70

Only unreason can be thought as eternal

It is perfectly possible to conceive of a time determined by the governance of fixed laws disappearing in something other than itself – it would disappear in another time governed by alternative laws. But only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute. Only unreason can be thought as eternal, because only unreason can be thought as at once anhypothetical and absolute. Accordingly, we can say that it is possible to demonstrate the absolute necessity of everything's non-necessity. In other words, it is possible to establish, through indirect demonstration, the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 62

A principle of unreason

The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 60

My thought of death

For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 57

The absence of any reason for my being

Even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. [...] For even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 56

Everything could collapse

Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 53

The meaning of scientific statements

How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin?

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 9-10

The peak mentality

Why do we need to identify certain things as peaks? Why isn't the fabric more important than peaks? It should be. Why can't the fabric of our so-called common life be the peak [of human achievement]? Why do we have to go to churches to have a peak experience, to a great temple in Greece – I am against this trivial peak-thinking, this peak-mentality in art or in architecture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Round Table Discussion: Positions In Art' in Positions in Art (MAK, 1994) p. 148

A society of laborers without labor

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical development had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. the fulfilment of the wish, therefor, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp. 4-5

Knowledge and thought have parted company for good

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 3

The geologic now of the Anthropocene

The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The Climate of History' in Critical Inquiry, 35, Winter 2009, p. 212

Augmenting reality

Far from producing only weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikõn in painting or writing – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 80

The history of the defeated and the lost

We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 75

Narrative and time

Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 52

The extension of expectation and memory

It is in the soul, hence as an impression, that expectation and memory possess extension. But the impression is in the soul only inasmuch as the mind acts, that is, expects, attends, and remembers.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 19

Time is a distention of the soul

Since I measure the movement of a body by time and not the other way around – since a long time can only be measured by a short time – and since no physical movement offers a fixed unit of measurement for comparison, the movement of the stars being assumed to be variable – it remains that the extension of time is a distention of the soul.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp. 15-16

Time empty and out of joint

Time empty and out of joint, with its rigorous formal and static order, its crushing unity and its irreversible series, is precisely the death instinct.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 136

Repetition is a historical condition

Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is produced.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 113

The past is the synthesis of all time

For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p.103

There must be another time

This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusion – that there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p.100

A contemplative soul

A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 95

A sum of contractions

Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 93

A succession of instants does not consitute time

A succession of instants does not consitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed. To it belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 91

The simulacrum is the true character or form

When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the "being" – of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 80

The work of art leaves the domain of representation

Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing. We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become "experience", transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 68

Representation and difference

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation: paintings or sculptures are already such "distorters", forcing us to create movement – that is, to combine a superficial and a penetrating view, or to ascend and descend within the space as we move through it.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 67

Conflict and difference

There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox – the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat?

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 62

Returning is becoming

That identity not be first, that it exists as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return. Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 50

Distinction is form

The Platonists used to say that the not-One distinguished itself from the One, but not the converse, since the One does not flee that which flees it; and at the other pole, form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is form.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) pp. 36-37

Blueprints

'Anna, it occurs to me – surely I can't be so bad – if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone... then it's a kind of blueprint for the future, isn't it?'
Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.434

To do without something one wants

It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing – I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 242

Literature is analysis after the event

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.210

The choice between arts and sciences

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose [...] between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 15

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

Life is a serious disorder

I know that we are morose, crypt-faced, inclined to the view that life is a serious disorder which ultimately proves fatal.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 360

Posterity's antiquities

The queer inverted craft of devising posterity's antiquities.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 160

Death is a process

The kernel of the legal impasse appears to be this – that life is not in law the opposite of death, nor is being born the opposite of dying. Death is a process, resulting usually in a serious fatality.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 160

The crisis of homogeneous space

The crisis of dimension thus appears as the crisis of the whole or, in other words, as the crisis of the substantial, homogeneous space, inherited from archaic Greek geometry, to the benefit of an accidental, heterogeneous space where parts and fractions become essential once again. Urban topology has, however, paid the prize for this atomization and disintegration of figures, of visible points of reference which promote transmigrations and transfigurations, much in the same way as landscapes suffered in the face of agricultural mechanization. The sudden breaking up of whole forms and the destruction of the entity caused by industrialization is, however, less perceptible within the space of the city – despite the destructuring of suburbia – than it is in time, in the sequential perception of urban appearances. In fact, for a long time now transparency has replaced appearances. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the depth of field of classical perspective has been renewed by the depth of time of advanced technology.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 549

The technique of construction and the construction of technique

Along with the technique of construction, there is, one must not forget, the construction of technique, the ensemble of spatial and temporal mutations which continually reorganize on an everyday basis the aesthetic representations of contemporary territory. Constructed spaces is thus not simply the result of the concrete and material effect of its structures, its permanence and its architectonic or urbanistic references, but also the result of a sudden proliferation, an incessant multiplying of special effects, which, with consciousness of time and distance, affects perception of the environment.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 547

Arrival supplants departure

With the advent of instantaneous communications (satellite, TV, fiber optics, telematics) arrival supplants departure: everything arrives without necessarily having to depart.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

A time that instantaneously exposes itself

Only a short time ago, the opening of the city's gates was determined by the alternating of day and night. Today, however, since we not only open the shutters but also the television, daylight itself has been changed. A false electronic day, whose only calendar is based on "commutations" of information bearing no relationship whatsoever to real time, is now added to the solar day of astronomy, electric light and the dubious "daylight" of candles. Chronological and historical time, which passes, is this succeeded by a time that instantaneously exposes itself. On the terminal's screen, a span of time becomes both the surface and the support of inscription: time literally or, rather, cinematically surfaces.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

Amnesia-ridden hills

Everything you now think of as a room—as space, as volume, as creation—will soon just be a suffocation of sand grains packed together in dense, amnesia-ridden hills, landscapes almost laughably quick to forget they once were architecture.

Geoff Manaugh, 'When Hills Hide Arches' on Bldg Blog, http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/when-hills-hide-arches.html (31/03/2014)

Purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure

You know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about this work that you’ve described – and I don’t even know if I can express it, Andre – but somehow, if I’ve understood what you’ve been saying, it somehow seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it and ask what it really was all about – the whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then be able to experience somehow just pure being… And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think it’s our nature to do things. I think purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure. And to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots; but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.

Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With Andre (Saga Productions Inc., 1981)

We are at the goal constantly

I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 72

Free of our activity

By silence, I mean the multiplicity of activity that constantly surrounds us. We call it ”silence” because it is free of our activity. It does not correspond to ideas of order or expressive feeling – they lead to order and expression, but when they do, it ”deafens” us to the sounds themselves.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 71

Direct contact with ephemerality

The nature of listening is the experience of hearing something and then realizing that you’re no longer hearing it and that you’re hearing something else. This is part and parcel of hearing. When you look at a painting, you don’t have the impression that the painting is disappearing. But as you listen to sounds, you have the impression that they’re gone, and that others have taken their place. And you’re brought right by paying attention to events in time. All you need to see is [that] you’re brought into direct contact with ephemerality.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 66

No such thing as empty space or empty time

There is no such thing as empty space or empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot… Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 61

Art is not an escape from life

Formerly, one was accustomed to thinking of art as something better organized than life that could be used as an escape from life. The changes that have taken place in this century, however, are such that art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 56

Commodity, the bias of the world

Commodity, the bias of the world,
The world, who of itself is peised well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid,
From a resolv'd and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet:
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand,
When his fair angels would salute my palm,
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.

William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John (The New Temple Shakespeare, 1935) pp. 28-29

Not my way of feeling

'What about the intensity, the excitement?'

'Oh, none of those aspects interested me. They're precisely the things about abstract expressionism which didn't interest me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I'm perfectly happy about my feelings. I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquility. I don't want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don't want somebody else to disturb my feelings. I don't spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.'

Irving Sandler, 'To Open Our Eyes' in Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 50

Silence, exile and cunning

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) pp. 268-269

The true and the beautiful

The true and the beautiful are akin. truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. [...] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 225

Static vs kinetic emotions

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 222

Those nets

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moment I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 220

At the mercy of reality

Everything that one has created achieves reality. And soon the day dawns when one finds oneself at the mercy of the reality that one has created; and mourns the days when one's life was almost void of reality, almost a nullity; idle, inoffensive fancies spun round a knot in a roof. His eye had already, this first night, become a mourning eye.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 405

A useful habit

It's a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 403

The source of the greatest song

For the understanding of the soul's defencelessness, of the conflict between the two poles, is not the source of the greatest song. The source of the greatest song is sympathy.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 400

Civilisation's stoves

At length he replied that when all was said and done, the stove flames of world civilisation were probably the very flames which fed the heart's inextinguishable distress, and it is also an open question, old woman, whether the body itself is not better off in an environment colder than that engendered by the flickering flames of civilisation's stoves. True, the world has great superficial beauty when it is at its best, in the murmuring groves of California, for instance, or in the sungilded palm-avenues of the Mediterranean, but the heart's inner glow grows so much the more ashen, the more brilliantly the diamonds of creation shine upon it. But for all that, old woman, I have always loved creation, and always tried to squeeze out of it al that I possibly could.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 353

The power of poetry

This was the first time that her soul was charmed by the power of poetry, which shows us the lot of man so truthfully and so sympathetically and with so much love for that which is good that we ourselves become better persons and understand life more fully than before, and hope and trust that good may always prevail in the life of man.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 244