The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atm...osphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Epic poem,--ten thousand lines--revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by night,--bang the field-piece,... twang the lyre."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death,... a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »