There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, ...in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shake...speare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the m...anifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the c...ity continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial c...entury.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has... been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one l...esson: Nothing is impossible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »