Jane Brox > Quotes

“To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it's likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 196o, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone ... Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination.”
― Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

“Soon now, the faint tinkling of a broken filament will become another sound of another century.”
― Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

“Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves- simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops - the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches- without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things.”
― Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

“Yet oil had already become so essential to modern life that in 1873 the Titusville Morning Herald proclaimed: "The production of petroleum has now become of such commercial and social importance to the world that if it were suddenly to cease no other known substance could supply its place, and such an event could not be looked upon in any other light than of a widespread calamity.”
― Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

“As a stalwart reader of printed books, I’m left to wonder what will happen to the wide, slow silty river of the their history, to the countless volumes waiting now in the abandoned silence of library stacks. Stacks: The word itself connects books to the harvest, to corn and hay. They were always earthbound. Smell the must, feel the brittle, browning pages between your thumb and forefinger. The tears, the cracked spines, the stains and folds. Even if we readers forget them, printed books will hold us in their memory.”
― Jane Brox

“On 10 December 1968, at a Red Cross centre near Bangkok, Thomas Merton gave a lecture affirming the place of the monastic as an outsider. ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’

Afterward, he went back to his cottage to rest and to shower before a scheduled evening panel discussion. He emerged from his shower, walking with wet feet on a wet floor. It’s surmised that he reached for a fan, which was later shown to have faulty wiring, and suffered a fatal electric shock. Merton’s body was flown back to the US on an Air Force transport to Oakland, then sent on a commercial carrier to Louisville.”
― Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

“Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. —John Cage”
― Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

“To learn to read, after all, is a descent into silence.”
― Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives