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p128: I dont know how others spend their time, but neither does anybody else. It’s lost anthropological knowledge; in order to recover it, the conditions of life would have to change in ways that are currently unimaginable.

p128: I dont know how others spend their time, but neither does anybody else. It’s lost anthropological knowledge; in order to recover it, the conditions of life would have to change in ways that are currently unimaginable.

Montage was invented in order to skip through time, in order to not have to wait. But once the effect of the novelty of montage had faded, what was to be done? A montage of a montage, to speed things up even more? Or a return to a patient immobility while waiting to think up something else?

sometimes one wonder why while we are reading and thinking ‘it is not that good...’ yet continuing to turn towards the next page, and the next..and now we are pg 236/ 286
is it because the escalating trail of absurdity mirrors the classic improv theatre exercise of “yes..and….” = it’s not that good, but let’s stick around

Our communication, initially meaningful and coherent, turns into a series of fitful exchanges containing neither sentences nor information: little words and sounds meant – I suppose – to keep the line between us open, but which, instead, make all too clear how far apart we are. So we have learned to split the work between us, stick to practical matters, and only speak to one another when necessary.

the best preparation for death is to live in the present moment

leapfrogging genres, narratives, pace, visual styles - very interesting approach, adhd fluidity, akin to channel surfing films, sidetracking distractions as its main feature, the narrative unfolds in those inbetween moments

…I think and I know that precisely this moment, precisely this picture, has already lodged itself in my mind and will never go away, I have lots of pictures like that in my mind, thousands of them, and from just one thought, from seeing just one thing that it looks like, or for no reason at all, a picture can turn up, often at the strangest times and places, …

Acquisitiveness even affects the way we read books.
We read to acquire cultural property and we hurry from volume to volume in order to expand our estate. We forget that reading is pleasurable. When we treat knowledge like a possession it loses something of its richness. Accumulating knowledge becomes mechanical, the transfer of information from the page to the brain. Being knowledgeable is more than having knowledge

…agency isn't the omnipotent belief that we're unaffected by our past and our unconscious, or that mere willpower can determine our lives. Agency is knowing that our control is limited and yet, within those limits, taking charge of our lives.

One of the most damaging, insidious effects of turning a blind eye is our loss of curiosity: we dampen it down in order not to see.

While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot. It was therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined.

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us.

the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

Metaphor is metaphysical as well as poetical, as in the ordering of chance, the harnessing of chaos.

Unconditioning what has been conditioned over lifetime requires practise.

“.. ultimately what mattered was not the truth of the scene, as much as what you ended up with in the photograph.
It's not the truth; it's a photograph. There's the life of the subject in the photograph, and then there's the life of the subject in the real world.”

“Often I find myself confused, but it is precisely such confusion that leads me forward.”

“I am no admirer of order--whether order appears in Eastern or Western guise, it always triggers suspicion in me. I dislike the constraints on human nature and the restrictions on choice that order imposes. When you break away from mandated meaning, you enter a state of tension with your surroundings, and it is then, when you are uncomfortable, that you are at your most alert.”

“If there is only the freedom to criticize, but no freedom to discuss, who’s going to be willing to be creative?”
Ai Qing. 12.01.1979

Podcast:
Antonio Damasio / The neuroscience of feeling and knowing // Chasing Consciousness podcast

https://open.spotify.com/episode/481u...

I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.

Cooking is a circular movement to meet the other.

Large numbers of total strangers can cooperate successfully if they believe in the same myths.

“A room without books is like a body without soul”
Cicero