In baseball there are generalists, who keep their eye on the ball and see the big picture; football is full of special-duty charac...ters who are very limited in terms of their range but have depth. Baseball represents America before the frontier ended, when there was plenty of space and plenty of time, and philosophic anarchists roamed around on verdant fields "doing their thing" with a free and reckless abandon. The game is relaxing and not particularly taxing on the players, who play many times each week. Football is tremendously difficult on the players and is so tiring that sixty minutes of clock time--which amounts to several hours of real time--exhausts them. Baseball developed when we thought nature was a limitless reservoir and we would always live in abundance. Football reflects a different world view; everything has to be fought for, resources are precious, hostile people (guards, monster men) are everywhere and in such a world you have to grab what you can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because film operates in real time, it is more limited. Novels end only when they feel like it. Film is, in general, restricted to... what Shakespeare called "the short two hours' traffic of our stage." Popular novels have been a vast reservoir of material for commercial films over the years.... But commercial film still can't reproduce the range of the novel in time. An average screenplay, for example, is 125 to 150 pages in length; the average novel twice that. Almost invariably, details of incident are lost in the translation from book to film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources... of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom,--it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And yet, and yet ... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of despera...tion and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simul...taneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no question but that you and I think alike in the great objectives of the peace when it comes. The real problem lies in t...he methods to be used to attain peace without hate.... [I]t is my thought that time is an essential in disseminating the ideals of peace among the very diverse nationalities and national egos of a vast number of separate peoples who, for one reason or another over a thousand years, have divided themselves into a hundred different forms of hate.... Therefore, I have been visualizing a superimposed--or if you like it, a superassumed--obligation by Russia, China, Britain and ourselves that we will act as sheriffs for the maintenance of order during the transition period.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anger is always concerned with individuals, ... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any inf...ormer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. The one aims at giving pain to its object, the other at doing him harm; the angry man wants his victim to feel; the hater does not mind whether they feel or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas tree ...will bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to b...ecome a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »