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Javier E

Book Club: A Guide To Living « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...book-club-a-guide-to-living

Montaigne philosophers skepticism conservatism

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • He proves nothing that he doesn’t simultaneously subvert a little; he makes no over-arching argument about the way humans must live; he has no logician’s architecture or religious doctrine. He slips past all those familiar means of telling other people what’s good for them, and simply explains what has worked for him and others and leaves the reader empowered to forge her own future
  • You can see its eccentric power by considering the alternative ways of doing what Montaigne was doing. Think of contemporary self-help books – and all the fake certainty and rigid formulae they contain. Or think of a hideous idea like “the purpose-driven life” in which everything must be forced into the box of divine guidance in order to really live at all. Think of the stringency of Christian disciplines – say, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and marvel at how Montaigne offers an entirely different and less compelling way to live. Think of the rigidity of Muslim practice and notice how much lee-way Montaigne gives to sin
  • This is a non-philosophical philosophy. It is a theory of practical life as told through one man’s random and yet not-so-random reflections on his time on earth. And it is shot through with doubt. Even the maxims that Montaigne embraces for living are edged with those critical elements of Montaigne’s thought that say “as far as I know”
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  • Is this enough? Or is it rather a capitulation to relativism, a manifesto for political quietism, a worldview that treats injustice as something to be abhorred but not constantly fought against? This might be seen as the core progressive objection to the way of Montaigne. Or is his sensibility in an age of religious terror and violence and fanaticism the only ultimate solution we have?
  • here’s what we do know. We are fallible beings; we have nothing but provisional knowledge; and we will die. And this is enough. This does not mean we should give up inquiring or seeking to understand. Skepticism is not nihilism. It doesn’t posit that there is no truth; it merely notes that if truth exists, it is inherently beyond our ultimate grasp. And accepting those limits is the first step toward sanity, toward getting on with life. This is what I mean by conservatism.
  • you can find in philosophy any number of clues about how to live; you can even construct them into an ideology that explains all of human life and society – like Marxism or free market fundamentalism or a Nietzschean will to power. But as each totalist system broke down upon my further inspection, I found myself returning to Montaigne and the tradition of skepticism he represents
  • If I were to single out one theme of Montaigne’s work that has stuck with me, it would be this staring of death in the face, early and often, and never flinching. It is what our culture refuses to do much of the time, thereby disempowering us in the face of our human challenges.
Javier E

Book Review - Examined Lives - By James Miller - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Bakewell-t.html

philosophy philosophers biography model

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Miller has now had the superb idea of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, while simultaneously using this model to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value. He covers 12 philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Laertius), Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. In each case, he explores the life selectively, looking for “crux” points and investigating how ideas of the philosophical life have changed.
  • Miller concludes that his 12 philosophical lives offer a moral that is “neither simple nor uniformly edifying.” It amounts mainly to the idea that philosophy can offer little or no consolation, and that the examined life is, if anything, “harder and less potentially rewarding” for us than it was for Socrates.
Javier E

In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...508748

essay fact culture truth science knowledge wisdom skepticism research

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim
  • D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion
  • Every piece of this is false in one way or another.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument
  • That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more
  • what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion.
  • Nonfiction is the source of the narcissistic injury that seems to drive him. “Nonfiction,” he suggests, is like saying “not art,” and if D’Agata, who has himself published several volumes of what he refers to as essays, desires a single thing above all, it is to be known as a maker of art.
  • D’Agata tells us that the term has been in use since about 1950. In fact, it was coined in 1867 by the staff of the Boston Public Library and entered widespread circulation after the turn of the 20th century. The concept’s birth and growth, in other words, did coincide with the rise of the novel to literary preeminence, and nonfiction did long carry an odor of disesteem. But that began to change at least as long ago as the 1960s, with the New Journalism and the “nonfiction novel.”
  • What we really seem to get in D’Agata’s trilogy, in other words, is a compendium of writing that the man himself just happens to like, or that he wants to appropriate as a lineage for his own work.
  • What it’s like is abysmal: partial to trivial formal experimentation, hackneyed artistic rebellion, opaque expressions of private meaning, and modish political posturing
  • If I bought a bag of chickpeas and opened it to find that it contained some chickpeas, some green peas, some pebbles, and some bits of goat poop, I would take it back to the store. And if the shopkeeper said, “Well, they’re ‘lyric’ chickpeas,” I would be entitled to say, “You should’ve told me that before I bought them.”
  • when he isn’t cooking quotes or otherwise fudging the record, he is simply indifferent to issues of factual accuracy, content to rely on a mixture of guesswork, hearsay, and his own rather faulty memory.
  • His rejoinders are more commonly a lot more hostile—not to mention juvenile (“Wow, Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine”), defensive, and in their overarching logic, deeply specious. He’s not a journalist, he insists; he’s an essayist. He isn’t dealing in anything as mundane as the facts; he’s dealing in “art, dickhead,” in “poetry,” and there are no rules in art.
  • D’Agata replies that there is something between history and fiction. “We all believe in emotional truths that could never hold water, but we still cling to them and insist on their relevance.” The “emotional truths” here, of course, are D’Agata’s, not Presley’s. If it feels right to say that tae kwon do was invented in ancient India (not modern Korea, as Fingal discovers it was), then that is when it was invented. The term for this is truthiness.
  • D’Agata clearly wants to have it both ways. He wants the imaginative freedom of fiction without relinquishing the credibility (and for some readers, the significance) of nonfiction. He has his fingers crossed, and he’s holding them behind his back. “John’s a different kind of writer,” an editor explains to Fingal early in the book. Indeed he is. But the word for such a writer isn’t essayist. It’s liar.
  • he point of all this nonsense, and a great deal more just like it, is to advance an argument about the essay and its history. The form, D’Agata’s story seems to go, was neglected during the long ages that worshiped “information” but slowly emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries as artists learned to defy convention and untrammel their imaginations, coming fully into its own over the past several decades with the dawning recognition of the illusory nature of knowledge.
  • Most delectable is when he speaks about “the essay’s traditional ‘five-paragraph’ form.” I almost fell off my chair when I got to that one. The five-paragraph essay—introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion; stultifying, formulaic, repetitive—is the province of high-school English teachers. I have never met one outside of a classroom, and like any decent college writing instructor, I never failed to try to wean my students away from them. The five-paragraph essay isn’t an essay; it’s a paper.
  • When he refers to his selections as essays, he does more than falsify the essay as a genre. He also effaces all the genres that they do belong to: not only poetry, fiction, journalism, and travel, but, among his older choices, history, parable, satire, the sermon, and more—genres that possess their own particular traditions, conventions, and expectation
  • —by ignoring the actual contexts of his selections, and thus their actual intentions—D’Agata makes the familiar contemporary move of imposing his own conceits and concerns upon the past. That is how ethnography turns into “song,” Socrates into an essayist, and the whole of literary history into a single man’s “emotional truth.”
  • The history of the essay is indeed intertwined with “facts,” but in a very different way than D’Agata imagines. D’Agata’s mind is Manichaean. Facts bad, imagination good
  • What he fails to understand is that facts and the essay are not antagonists but siblings, offspring of the same historical moment
  • one needs to recognize that facts themselves have a history.
  • Facts are not just any sort of knowledge, such as also existed in the ancient and medieval worlds. A fact is a unit of information that has been established through uniquely modern methods
  • Fact, etymologically, means “something done”—that is, an act or deed
  • It was only in the 16th century—an age that saw the dawning of a new empirical spirit, one that would issue not only in modern science, but also in modern historiography, journalism, and scholarship—that the word began to signify our current sense of “real state of things.”
  • It was at this exact time, and in this exact spirit, that the essay was born. What distinguished Montaigne’s new form—his “essays” or attempts to discover and publish the truth about himself—was not that it was personal (precursors like Seneca also wrote personally), but that it was scrupulously investigative. Montaigne was conducting research into his soul, and he was determined to get it right.
  • His famous motto, Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”—was an expression not of radical doubt but of the kind of skepticism that fueled the modern revolution in knowledge.
  • It is no coincidence that the first English essayist, Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon, was also the first great theorist of science.
  • That knowledge is problematic—difficult to establish, labile once created, often imprecise and always subject to the limitations of the human mind—is not the discovery of postmodernism. It is a foundational insight of the age of science, of fact and information, itself.
  • The point is not that facts do not exist, but that they are unstable (and are becoming more so as the pace of science quickens). Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument—by observation and interpretation—and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one
  • A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest.
  • Sometimes those arguments are scientific papers. Sometimes they are news reports, which are arguments with everything except the conclusions left out (the legwork, the notes, the triangulation of sources—the research and the reasoning).
  • When it comes to essays, though, we don’t refer to those conclusions as facts. We refer to them as wisdom, or ideas
  • the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more than just emotional.
caelengrubb

Free Market - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...FreeMarket.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Free market” is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society.
  • Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services
  • Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past.
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  • Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.
  • This simple reasoning refutes the argument against free trade typical of the “mercantilist” period of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe and classically expounded by the famed sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne.
  • At each stage of production from natural resource to consumer good, money is voluntarily exchanged for capital goods, labor services, and land resources. At each step of the way, terms of exchanges, or prices, are determined by the voluntary interactions of suppliers and demanders. This market is “free” because choices, at each step, are made freely and voluntarily.
  • We can immediately see the fallacy in this still-popular viewpoint: the willingness and even eagerness to trade means that both parties benefit. In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a “positive-sum” rather than a “zero-sum” or “negative-sum” game.
  • Each one values the two goods or services differently, and these differences set the scene for an exchange.
  • Two factors determine the terms of any agreement: how much each participant values each good in question, and each participant’s bargaining skills.
  • the market in relation to how favorably buyers evaluate these goods—in shorthand, by the interaction of their supply with the demand for them.
  • On the other hand, given the buyers’ evaluation, or demand, for a good, if the supply increases, each unit of supply—each baseball card or loaf of bread—will fall in value, and therefore the price of the good will fall. The reverse occurs if the supply of the good decreases.
  • The market, then, is not simply an array; it is a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges.
  • Production begins with natural resources, and then various forms of machines and capital goods, until finally, goods are sold to the consumer.
  • The mercantilists argued that in any trade, one party can benefit only at the expense of the other—that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, an “exploiter” and an “exploited.”
  • A common charge against the free-market society is that it institutes “the law of the jungle,” of “dog eat dog,” that it spurns human cooperation for competition and exalts material success as opposed to spiritual values, philosophy, or leisure activities.
  • Saving and investment can then develop capital goods and increase the productivity and wages of workers, thereby increasing their standard of living.
  • The free competitive market also rewards and stimulates technological innovation that allows the innovator to get a head start in satisfying consumer wants in new and creative ways.
  • Government, in every society, is the only lawful system of coercion. Taxation is a coerced exchange, and the heavier the burden of taxation on production, the more likely it is that economic growth will falter and decline
  • The ultimate in government coercion is socialism.
  • Under socialist central planning the socialist planning board lacks a price system for land or capital goods.
  • Market socialism is, in fact, a contradiction in terms.
  • The fashionable discussion of market socialism often overlooks one crucial aspect of the market: When two goods are exchanged, what is really exchanged is the property titles in those goods.
  • This means that the key to the existence and flourishing of the free market is a society in which the rights and titles of private property are respected, defended, and kept secure.
  • The key to socialism, on the other hand, is government ownership of the means of production, land, and capital goods.
  • Under socialism, therefore, there can be no market in land or capital goods worthy of the name.
  • ome critics of the free market argue that property rights are in conflict with “human” rights. But the critics fail to realize that in a free-market system, every person has a property right over his own person and his own labor and can make free contracts for those services.
  • The free market and the free price system make goods from around the world available to consumers.
  • It is the coercive countries with little or no market activity—the notable examples in the last half of the twentieth century were the communist countries—where the grind of daily existence not only impoverishes people materially but also deadens their spirit.
Javier E

Harold Bloom Is Dead. But His 'Rage for Reading' Is Undiminished. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...book-of-life-harold-bloom.html

books classics reading critic language knowledge education literature

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It’s a series of meditations on what Bloom believes to be the most important novels we have, and it takes for granted that its readers already know the books under consideration; in other words, that they have already absorbed “the canon,” and are eager to reconsider it later in their lives.
  • A not atypical, almost throwaway passage for you to test the waters on: “Tolstoy, as befits the writer since Shakespeare who most has the art of the actual, combines in his representational praxis the incompatible powers of Homer and the Yahwist.” This is not Bloom showing off; it’s the way Bloom thinks and proceeds.
  • Apart from his novelists, his frame of reference rests on Shakespeare above all others, Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Emerson, Dr. Johnson (the “shrewdest of all literary critics”), Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman (for him, the central American writer of the 19th century), Wallace Stevens, Freud
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  • Among the novelists, Cervantes, Tolstoy (supreme), Melville, Austen, Proust, Joyce.
  • He is inevitably at his strongest when dealing with those writers he cares most about. With Jane Austen, for one. And, above all, with Tolstoy:
  • As for Dickens, whose “David Copperfield” was a direct influence on Tolstoy, to Bloom his greatest achievement is “Bleak House”
  • He pairs it with Dickens’s final complete novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” a book I care for so extravagantly that I’ve read it three times
  • The two works in which Bloom is most fully invested are “Moby-Dick” (40 pages) and “Ulysses” (54)
  • He chooses to give room to not one but two of Le Guin’s novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,”
clairemann

Opinion | The Mental Virtues - The New York Times - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-mental-virtues.html

shared by clairemann on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • First, there is love of learning
  • Second, there is courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions
  • Third, there is firmness
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Fourth, there is humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy.
  • Fifth, there is autonomy
  • Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to
  • Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.
  • The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. The firm believer can build a steady worldview on solid timbers but still delight in new information
  • Finally, there is generosity
  • the mind is embedded in human nature, and very often thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths.
  • Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.
  • wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations
  • Montaigne once wrote that “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
  • Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?
  • Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
  • Javier E on 14 Sep 15
     
    willing to look at things that are surprisingly hard to look at.
Javier E

The Warehouse Worker Who Became a Philosopher - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...679486

philosopher podcast guide role model knowledge technology

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • leven years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24, and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Homeless at times, he had mainly grown up in group homes and foster-care programs up and down the West Coast after being taken away from his family at 9. He learned to find solace in books.
  • He would tell himself to be grateful for the work: “It’s manual, physical labor, but it’s better than 99.9 percent of jobs that have ever existed in human history.” By the time most kids have graduated from college, he had consumed “the entire Western canon of philosophy.”
  • A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on. “I would just queue up audio books and listen and pause and think about it and contextualize as much as I could,” he told me. “I was at work for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy; a couple hours interpreting it, just thinking about it. In the last hour of the day, I’d turn on a podcast.”
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  • West started his podcast, Philosophize This, in 2013. Podcasting, he realized, was the one “technological medium where there’s no barrier to entry.” He “just turned on a microphone and started talking.”
  • Within months, he was earning enough from donations to quit his warehouse job and pursue philosophy full-time. Now he has some 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and Philosophize This holds the No. 3 spot in the country for philosophy podcasts on Apple.
  • He treats the philosophical claims of any given thinker, however outdated, within the sense-making texture of their own time, oscillating adroitly between explanation and criticism and—this is rare—refusing to condescend from the privilege of the present
  • He is, as he once described the 10th-century Islamic scholar Al-Fārābī, “a peacemaker between different time periods.” All the episodes display the qualities that make West so compelling: unpretentious erudition, folksy delivery, subtle wit, and respect for a job well done.
  • “Academic philosophy is cloistered and impenetrable, but it needn’t be,” he told me. West, he said, “doesn’t preen or preach or teach; he just talks to you like a smart, curious adult.”
  • “He’s coming at this stuff from the perspective of a person actually searching for interesting answers, not as someone who is seeking academic legitimacy,” Shapiro said. “Too much philosophy is directed toward the other philosophers in the walled garden. He’s doing the opposite.”
  • I counted just six books on a shelf next to a pair of orange dumbbells: The Complete Essays of Montaigne; The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin; Richard Harland’s Literary Theory From Plato to Barthes; an anthology of feminist theory; And Yet, by Christopher Hitchens; and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The rest of his reading material lives on a Kindle. “If you look at the desktop of my computer, it’ll be a ton of tabs open,” he said, laughing. “Maybe it’s the clutter you’d be expecting.”
  • He just “always wanted to be wiser,” Alina said. “I mean, when he was younger, he literally Googled who was the wisest person.” (Here we can give Socrates his flowers once again.) “That’s how he got into philosophy.”
  • All of us are, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, inexorably the combination of our innate, inimitable selves and the circumstances in which we are embedded. “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.”
  • We are captive to the economic, racial, and technological limits of our times, just as we may be propelled forward in unforeseen ways by the winds of innovation.
  • Now he can design any life he likes. “I could be in Bora Bora right now,” he told me. “But I don’t want to be.” He wants to be in Puyallup with his family, in a place “where I can read and do my work and pace around and think about stuff.”
Javier E

In Memoriam: Lewis H. Lapham (1935-2024), by Harper's Magazine - 0 views

harpers.org/...in-memoriam-lewis-h-lapham

lapham history essay wisdom words language learning imagination loss freedom

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • By drawing upon the authority of Montaigne, who begins his essay “Of Books” with what would be regarded on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill as a career-ending display of transparency:
  • I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth. This is simply a trial [essai] of my natural faculties, and not of my acquired ones. If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answerable to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them. . . .
  • When I was thirty I assumed that by the time I was fifty I would know what I was talking about. The notice didn’t arrive in the mail. At fifty I knew less than what I thought I knew at thirty, and so I figured that by the time I was seventy, then surely, this being America, where all the stories supposedly end in the key of C major, I would have come up with a reason to believe that I had been made wise. Now I’m seventy-five, and I see no sign of a dog with a bird in its mouth.
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  • I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear of what might happen tomorrow.
  • y object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.
  • On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript, I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “colossal humbug.”
  • On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 bc, and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.
  • The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”
  • It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.
  • What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.
  • How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech.
  • The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused.
  • I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
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