A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann... Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,... drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,... icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Somebody arranges the rows of cans... so that they softly say: esso--so--so--so to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, but it is dirty! Mthis little filling station,... oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency. Be careful with that match!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »