The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for y...ou, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If psychoanalysis emerged just before World War I to deal with the repressions of Puritanism, the hedonistic age has its counterpa...rt in sensitivity training, encounter groups, "joy therapy," and similar techniques that have two characteristics essentially derived from a hedonistic mood: they are conducted almost exclusively in groups; and they try to "unblock" the individual by physical contact, by groping, touching, fondling, manipulating. Where the earlier intention of psychoanalysis was to enable the patient to achieve self-insight and thereby redirect his life--an aim inseparable from a moral context--the newer therapies are entirely instrumental and psychologistic; their aim is to "free" the person from inhibitions and restraints so that he or she can more easily express his impulses and feelings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of thin...gs today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where t...he air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once ...a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »