We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--desp...ite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another;... it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That way of inspiration is always open,... and open to everyone; it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Ve...rne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery. The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of l...ight by which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world's presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise. Now we seem to need just the opposite; sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In science, which, being fixed and limited, admits of no other variety than such as arises from new methods of distribution, or ne...w arts of illustration, the necessity of following the traces of our predecessors is indisputably evident; but there appears no reason why imagination should be subject to the same restraint.... The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must either follow or meet one another; but in the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction claims for her dominion, there are surely a thousand recesses unexplored, a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal inhabitants not hitherto described.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because ...the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »