Steve Kemple

“Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“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

“Madness,” he exclaimed to himself, in astonishment, faltering. “Madness! What do they want? Once again, once again!” War once again, war that had so recently shattered his whole life? With a strange shudder, he looked at those young faces, staring at the black mass on the move in ranks of four, like a square strip of film running, unrolling out of a narrow alley as if out of a dark box, and every face it showed was instantly rigid with bitter determination, a threat, a weapon. Why was this threat so noisily uttered on a mild June evening, hammered home in a gently dreaming city? “What do they want? What do they want?” The question still had him by the throat. Only just now he had seen the world in bright, musical clarity, with the light of love and tenderness shining over it, he had been part of a melody of kindness and trust. And suddenly the iron steps of that marching throng were treading everything down, men girding themselves for the fray, men of a thousand different kinds, shouting with a thousand voices, yet expressing only one thing in their eyes and their onward march, hate, hate, hate.”
― Stefan Zweig, Journey into the Past