The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in--telephonic, technolo...gical and relational--to alter even the slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake and Goethe were individualists par excellence, uncompromisingly protective of their single vision. In both Faust Part II and... The Four Zoas, emphasis on the universality of the poet's message contrasts with the resistant texture of a compressed style and the striking complexity of the mythological machinery. Blake likes to emphasize that he is not writing for the simple-minded; Goethe takes a teasing pleasure in keeping philologists busy. Faust and The Four Zoas are dramatic epics of Humanity, but embodied in a mythic language whose uniqueness and quirkiness are jealously guarded. Blake never published The Four Zoas, though it culminates his early prophecies and provides the indispensable key to the later ones. And Goethe refused to allow Faust Part II to be printed in its entirety until after his death. Both poets postponed the public's discovery of their central works; secrecy was enforced as long as it could be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is the way in which they view reality. The novel renders reality c...losely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real complexity of temperament and motive. Character is more important than action or plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.... By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. F...or if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the hig...hest complexity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representatio...ns, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are times when they seem so small! And then again, although they never seem large, there is a vastness behind them, a past o...f indefinite complexity and marvel, an amazing power of absorbing and assimilating, which forces one to suspect some power in the race so different from our own that one cannot understand that power. And ... whatever doubts or vexations one has in Japan, it is only necessary to ask oneself: "Well, who are the best people to live with?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not only their own need to mother that takes some women by surprise; there is also the shock of discovering the complexity o...f alternative child-care arrangements that have been made to sound so simple. Those for whom the intended solution is equal parenting have found that some parents are more equal than others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »