The website of Zaha Hadid Architects brags that the buildings for a new project are “iconic in both their scale and ambition… creating a unique twisted, intertwined silhouette that punctures the skyline.” But architects should not want to create things that are “iconic in scale” or to “puncture the skyline.” This is precisely the wrong thing to care about; it suggests the architect simply craves attention rather than the creation of perfect beauty and comfort. You’re not supposed to be puncturing! You’re supposed to be adding another delicate and perfect note to the skyline’s gorgeous symphony.
A shared egalitarian social undertaking, ideally, ought to be one of joy as well as struggle: in these desperate times, there are certainly more overwhelming imperatives than making the world beautiful to look at, but to decline to make the world more beautiful when it’s in your power to so, or to destroy some beautiful thing without need, is a grotesque perversion of the cooperative ideal.
To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people.
Creative naturalism is the beautiful revenge of people who feel they’re being outrun by time and human opportunity: the real thing speeds past you, impervious, so you reconjure it on the screen, where you and everybody else can live in it forever.
In the end, the “Before” series embraces what we’d rather forget: every true love story is a story of bad timing.
Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.
Why should I leave instructions? The ashes will be my family’s, not mine, the scattering their mnemonic for the idea of me.
Talking with someone who reveals nothing, I hear myself madly filling the emptiness with information about myself.
Faced with a camera lens, hideously overwitnessed, I immediately start trying to impersonate myself.
Some people love only those they can condescend to, those they can tenderly despise.
It’s interesting to watch my friend speak carefully about what he thinks I’ll find interesting.
If you can’t be with the one you love, my friend says, love the one who looks like the one you love. Other people call this having a type. It’s an expression of grief for an original loss.
Mothers must have sung to their babies before there was such a thing as music. I wonder what they thought of it, how they understood it, that singing.
After I submitted the final draft of my book about a train-track suicide, the art department produced sketches for my book cover: a needle and a long skein of red thread; a length of fluffy pinkish lace; a yellow hand mirror lying on a patch of green grass. I gave my editor a note for the designers, and the next day they delivered a perfect cover design: a photograph of the book’s subject, a man sitting on a train. This was the note: Pretend this book was written by a man.
The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.
It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.
It can’t be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one–when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own.
Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing.
The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.
We can hardly ever hurt children by putting too much information within their reach.
He finds it mysterious and exciting that the label that said FRUIT COCKTAIL yesterday still says it today–always says it. And indeed it is mysterious and exciting that, in writing, we should be able to freeze and preserve for as long as we want such perishable goods as thought and speech.
Now and then he would say indignantly, “Too much peoples!” To which I could only agree.
Pictures are flat; life has depth. The business of turning real objects into flat pictures is a convention, like language, and like language, it must be learned.
The children, of course, were not drawing a tree but what they had learned to recognize as a symbol of a tree, almost like a large hieroglyph. The lines they put on the paper did not look to them like a tree; they meant tree.
It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it.