Steve Kemple

“we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world.” A fabricated world? Yes, the world as a superstructure, the world as a spirit, weightless and abstract, of the same material with which thoughts are woven, and through which therefore they can move unhindered. A world that after three hundred years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything lies within humanity’s horizons of comprehension, from the biggest, the universe, whose oldest observable light, the farthest boundary of the cosmos, dates from its birth fifteen billion years ago, to the smallest, the protons and neutrons and mesons of the atom.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“67.What Jacob discovered in himself has similarities to a phenomenon reported in experimental animals by Arnaud Noreña and Jos Eggermont in 2005. They found that cats exposed to “noise trauma” and then raised for a few weeks in a quiet environment developed not only hearing loss but distorted tonotopic maps in the primary auditory cortex. (They would have complained of pitch distortion, were they able to.) If, however, the cats were exposed to an enriched acoustic environment for several weeks following exposure to noise trauma, their hearing loss was less severe, and distortions in their auditory cortical mapping did not occur.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

“For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them. I”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit. A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own cameras aside and turning to the horde—collecting and arranging photographs that they have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third thing—and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other particles, carries a charge. A”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays