Kristina

“Only a handful of employers at this time understood that the worker might be useful to the capitalist as a consumer; that he needed to be imbued with a taste for higher things; that an economy based on mass production required not only the capitalistic organization of production but the organization of consumption and leisure as well. “Mass production,” said the Boston department store magnate Edward A. Filene in 1919, “demands the education of the masses; the masses must learn to behave like human beings in a mass production world. . . . They must achieve, not mere literacy, but culture.” In other words, the modern manufacturer has to “educate” the masses in the culture of consumption. The mass production of commodities in ever-increasing abundance demands a mass market to absorb them.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. . . . Modern life is so mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. . . . The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn’t been so stupidly meagre. There weren’t, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried—too deeply (didn’t it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some service—saved her from a capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then they would be in possession of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why—since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people—their reunion had been so long averted. They didn’t use that name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of confession that they didn’t quite want it to be a failure.”
― Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle

“Bet ar tikrai tankai svarbesni už kriaušes? Ilgainiui Kare­las ėmė suprasti, kad atsakymas į šį klausimą ne toks aki­vaizdus, kaip jis visada manė, ir slapčia širdyje ėmė pritarti mamos vaizdiniui: didžiulė kriaušė pirmame plane ir kaž­kur toli toli - tankas, ne ką didesnis už boružėlę, pasirengu­sią bet kurią akimirką pakilti į orą ir dingti iš akių. Na taip, mama iš tikrųjų teisi: tankas mirtingas, o kriaušė amžina.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting