Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.
Alain de Botton
Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.
In my work I have pushed away the weight of clock time, of calendar time, of linear unravellings. Time may be what stops everything from happening at once, but time’s domain is the outer world. In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously. Our non-linear self is uninterested in ‘when’, much more interested in ‘wherefore’.
I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
[…] it’s forgetting not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” (Jorge Luis) Borges writes, “is to forget.
If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it’s also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build upon another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.
With its high ceiling and muted lighting, the capacious lobby of the Hotel Okura’s main building seemed like a huge, stylish cave. Against the cave walls, like the sighing of a disemboweled animal, bounced the muted conversations of people seated on the lobby’s sofas. The floor’s thick, soft carpeting could have been primeval moss on a far northern island. It absorbed the sound of footsteps into its endless span of accumulated time.
Ninety-nine cents, by contrast, has the physiological profile of pennies but the revenue of dollars.
There is a mistaken idea, ancient but still with us, that an overdose of anything from fornication to hot chocolate will teach restraint by the very results of its abuse.
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.
