Like Christianity, modern science teaches that these things of the world of senses are not really real, but that there is a more r...eal reality, in Nature, behind these appearances, a permanent, unchanging reality in comparison to which the world of appearance is ever changing and is an accidental product of our sense organs. Unlike the "other world" of Christianity, which is world of spirit or mind, altogether without body, this "other world" of science is a world of matter, altogether without spirit, life, or mind. This ultimately real world is the world of particles (little bits of dead stuff), of space and time and of forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, and more recently the strong and weak nuclear forces).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dea...d zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me acr...oss space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist.... When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The da...y you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing... Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles t...he preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know, it must have been my imagination, but it makes me realize how desperately alone the Earth is. Hanging in space like a spec...k of food floating in the ocean. Sooner or later to be swallowed up by some creature floating by.... Time will tell, Dr. Mason. We can only wait and wonder. Wonder how, wonder when.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »