Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Titles by their nature imply that the playâs architecture is like a bullâs-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.
I do believe that thinking is an overrated medium for achieving thought.
Perhaps we have lost the guiding force of form; we live in the age of prose. Everything is goop.
Why is it so horrible to see certain professionalized child actors on stage? Is it because they are in a state of premature work rather than in a state of play?
Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: âItâs beautiful but I donât like it.â And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? Itâs beautiful, but I donât like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I donât like it, so itâs not beautiful.
The world is a comedy made up of lots of individual tragedies.
One is reminded of George Bernard Shawâs remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read.
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.
Men always make their gods in their own image.
In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours.
Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?
It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.
A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch.
Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.
Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
The words âtrueâ and âfalseâ come from the universe of language, and no other.
Like telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of idiosyncratic events. There is no beginning, middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none implied by telegraphy. The world is atomized.
There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what Iâm seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.
Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, âLucien canât stand Jews.â It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity.
Girls come to think of themselves as âpositioned in spaceâ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements.
We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control.