Isn't Hollywood a dump--in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of t...he human spirit at a new low of debasement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be... called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view!... The fountain's fall, the river's flow, The woody valleys, warm and low; The windy summit, wild and high, Roughly rushing on the sky! The pleasant seat, the ruined tow'r, The naked rock, the shady bow'r; The town and village, dome and farm, Each give each a double charm, As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were ...by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of b...eing which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!... Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even young grandparents seem enormously old to a small child, although the child may politely deny it. One small girl, feeling pro...ud of reaching the monumental age of four, turned to her young-looking grandmother and asked, "How come I'm so old if you're so new?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The so-called new Russian man is characterized mainly by his complete exhaustion. You may find yourself wondering if he has the st...rength to enjoy his new-found freedom. He is like a long- distance runner who, on reaching the finishing line, is incapable even of raising his hands in a gesture of victory.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 »
In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas wi...ll extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things--like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »