I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order t...o extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Music, theoretically considered, consists altogether of lines of tone. It more nearly resembles a picture or an architectural draw...ing, than any other art creation; the difference being that in a drawing the lines are visible and constant, while in music they are audible and in motion. The separate tones are the points through which the lines are drawn; and the impression which is intended, and which is apprehended by the intelligent listener, is not that of single tones, but of continuous lines of tones, describing movements, curves and angles, rising, falling, poising--directly analogous to the linear impressions conveyed by a picture or drawing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain... that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious--to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewo...ven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Newspapers had a different perceptual impact on the reader than the printed book. Unlike the linear development of a plot or an ar...gument in the book, the concurrent reporting of news from different parts of the world made newspapers a mosaic of unrelated events. Newspapers contracted time to the instantaneous and the sensational, expanded space to include anything from everywhere. The present became much more diverse and complex, no longer containable within a single chronological framework. And the reader had to provide the connection between the different news items.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and... rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismis...s names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity--their links with their dead and the unborn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It ...dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a... set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »