ㅤ Kindland

“Everything they told me to be, I never could be. I never could be because I never was. Does that make sense? And even if you’re just like me, even if I try to show you, you won’t see me. Not for years. I feel like the Invisible Man. Actually I’ve never seen that movie or read the book (are they even related? I’m remembering someone taped up like a mummy, but I think the book was about a black guy?).”
― Jackie Ess, Darryl

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde

“This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus