The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effor...tlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo...neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But after a series of interludes In furnished rooms (describe wallpaper)... Transient hotels (mention sink and cockroaches) And spending the night with a beautiful married woman Whose husband was away in Centerville on business....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where prev...iously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view,... intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produc...ed Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »