Chris Glynn

“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”
― Pina Bausch

“This is, perhaps, the utility of poets and artists. But let us now consider the pleasure they procure.
Well then, this pleasure usually stems from the fact that they know how to hide, to dissimulate their usefulness, that they do not turn into professors or moralists. That they limit themselves to transmitting to you their own emotion, their surprise, their wonder, their sense of the unexpected, the fatal, even of the tragic in daily reality. That they do not propose for you to change it but only to see it - and this, in the same conditions of quiet, security, tranquility, comfort, equilibrium - evidently factitious - which you are enjoying then, at the same time.”
― Francis Ponge, Soap

“The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.”
― Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Adresses, 1978-1990

“Bernard Shaw phrased the experience very admirably: “When we learn something, it feels at first as if we have lost something.” It is so, for instance, with a new stroke at tennis. Our old stroke had been a pretty incompetent affair, of the sort to make a professional laugh. But it had been ours, we were used to it, all our muscles were in the habit of it. The new stroke is doubtless better, but we are not in the way of it, we cannot do anything with it, and all the joy goes out of tennis—but only until we have mastered the new way. Then, quite suddenly, we find that the whole game is a new experience.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity