I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that foll...ows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist w...hen the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The stage is three-dimensional, the movie multi-dimensional.... The stage play can create epic, for example, only by borrowing mov...ie methods. The movie, likewise, can debate ideas only by imitating the relative stasis of theater and, in pursuit of ideas or not, it unnaturally limits its prowess by containing action within one room or other closely confined area.... The imperative of movie motion makes any concession to the working principles of theater a retrograde act, for the form of a play must be violated in order to be converted; if this violation is shirked, the movie's integrity will be sacrificed for that of the play. One cannot possibly imagine a fluid movie adapted from a play by Moliere, Chekhov, Sternheim, or Pirandello, unless the original content were disastrously modified. Nor can the social dramas of Ibsen and the discursive comedies of Shaw profit from the movie medium. Their action, in the literal sense, is not going anywhere; their moods and theses can only be dissipated by a compulsively mobile camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human c...ontact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle--absolute busyness--then utopia and melancholy will ...come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy--and without consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass s...tate of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »