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Enemies Are Somewhere Else, As The Fighting Is Almost Always “over There,” With Islamic Fundamentalism Now Replacing Russian And Chinese Communism As The Implacable, Furtive Menace. And “terrorist” Is A More Flexible Word Than “communist.” It Can Unify A Larger Number Of Quite Different Struggles And Interests. What This May Mean Is That The War Will Be Endless---since There Will Always Be Some Terrorism.

-Susan Sontag

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Enemies Are Somewhere Else,

Susan Sontag

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Enemies Are Somewhere Else, As The Fighting Is Almost Always “over There,” With Islamic Fundamentalism Now Replacing Russian And Chinese Communism As The Implacable, Furtive Menace. And “terrorist” Is A More Flexible Word Than “communist.” It Can Unify A Larger Number Of Quite Different Struggles And Interests. What This May Mean Is That The War Will Be Endless---since There Will Always Be Some Terrorism.

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My Own View Is That One Cannot Be Religious In General Any More Than One Can Speak Language In General; At Any Given Moment One Speaks French Or English Or Swahili Or Japanese, But Not 'language.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

The Fear Of Becoming Old Is Born Of The Recognition That One Is Not Living Now The Life That One Wishes.

That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.

Photography Is A Kind Of Overstatement, A Heroic Copulation With The Material World.

Photographs Are Perhaps The Most Mysterious Of All The Objects That Make Up, And Thicken, The Environment We Recognize As Modern. Photographs Really Are Experience Captured, And The Camera Is The Ideal Arm Of Consciousness In Its Acquisitive Mood.

If Within The Last Century Art Conceived As An Autonomous Activity Has Come To Be Invested With An Unprecedented Stature - The Nearest Thing To A Sacramental Human Activity Acknowledged By Secular Society - It Is Because One Of The Tasks Art Has Assumed Is Making Forays Into And Taking Up Positions On The Frontiers Of Consciousness (often Very Dangerous To The Artist As A Person) And Reporting Back What's There.

Secular Society

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead. Pay Attention. It's All About Paying Attention. Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

The Taste For Worst-case Scenarios Reflects The Need To Master Fear Of What Is Felt To Be Uncontrollable. It Also Expresses An Imaginative Complicity With Disaster.

Worst Case Scenario

I'm Extremely Interested In The Russian Formalists And Have Been For Many Years. I'm More Drawn To Their Writing, Which Is Expressive And Literary, Than To Writing Which Is Extremely Academic Or Jargon-ridden.

What Pornographic Literature Does Is Precisely To Drive A Wedge Between One's Existence As A Sexual Being - While In Ordinary Life A Healthy Person Is One Who Prevents Such A Gap From Opening Up

Norman Mailer Records In His Recent Essays And Public Appearances His Perfecting Of Himself As A Virile Instrument Of Letters; He Is Perpetually In Training, Getting Ready To Launch Himself From His Own Missile Pad Into A High, Beautiful Orbit; Even His Failures May Yet Be Turned To Successes.

Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response. Nothing Is More Decisive. There Is Taste In People, Visual Taste, Taste In Emotion - And There Is Taste In Acts, Taste In Morality. Intelligence, As Well, Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

If I Thought That What I'm Doing When I Write Is Expressing Myself, I'd Junk The Typewriter. Writing Is A Much More Complicated Activity That That.

Dissimulation, Secretiveness, Appear A Necessity To The Melancholic. He Has Complex, Often Veiled Relations With Others. These Feelings Of Superiority, Of Inadequacy, Of Baffled Feeling, Of Not Being Able To Get What One Wants, Or Even Name It Properly (or Consistently) To Oneself — These Can Be, It Is Felt They Ought To Be, Masked By Friendliness, Or The Most Scrupulous Manipulation.

The Camera Can Be Lenient; It Is Can Also Expert At Being Cruel. But Its Cruelty Only Produces Another Kind Of Beauty, According To The Surrealist Preferences Which Rule Photographic Taste.

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples. The World All In Couples, Each Couple In Its Own Little House, Watching Its Own Little Interests And Stewing In Its Own Little Privacy - It's The Most Repulsive Thing In The World. One's Got To Get Rid Of The Exclusiveness Of Married Love.

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

10 Percent Of Any Population Is Cruel, No Matter What, And 10 Percent Is Merciful, No Matter What, And The Remaining 80 Percent Can Be Moved In Either Direction.

The Love Of The Famous, Like All Strong Passions, Is Quite Abstract. Its Intensity Can Be Measured Mathematically, And It Is Independent Of Persons.

Illnesses Have Always Been Used As Metaphors To Enliven Charges That A Society Was Corrupt Or Unjust.

As One Passion Begins To Fail It Is Necessary To Form Another, For The Whole Art Of Going Through Life Tolerably Is To Keep Oneself Eager About Anything.

It Is The Nature Of Aphoristic Thinking To Be Always In A State Of Concluding; A Bid To Have The Final Word Is Inherent In All Powerful Phrase-making.

Just As A Camera Is A Sublimation Of The Gun, To Photograph Someone Is A Subliminal Murder - A Soft Murder, Appropriate To A Sad, Frightened Time.

Loeb Has Been Doing Wonderfully Patient Work, Exploring The American Conscience From The Inside. I Regard Him As Something Of A National Treasure.

Quotation Is A Method Of Appropriation Which Is Invincible, I Think. It's Not A Procedure Which Displeases Me, Contrary To Recycling.

Detachment Is The Prerogative Of An Elite; And As The Dandy Is The Nineteenth Century's Surrogate For The Aristocrat In Matters Ofculture, So Camp Is The Modern Dandyism. Camp Is The Answer To The Problem: How To Be A Dandy In The Age Of Mass Culture.

Everything Has Changed And Nothing Is Changed.

Things Have Changed

Love Words, Agonize Over Sentences. And Pay Attention To The World.

Any Disease That Is Treated As A Mystery And Acutely Enough Feared Will Be Felt To Be Morally, If Not Literally, Contagious.

Decline Of The Letter, The Rise Of The Notebook! One Doesn't Write To Others Any More; One Writes To Oneself.

I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.

Unrequited Love

Pornography Is A Theatre Of Types, Never Of Individuals.

The Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

What Is The Most Beautiful In Virile Men Is Something Feminine; What Is Most Beautiful In Feminine Women Is Something Masculine.

Most Writers I Know Have Switched To Word Processors. I Haven't But I'm Very Curious About Why People Like It So Much. I Think It Has Something To Do With The Fact That At Last Writing, Which Has Been Such An Old-fashioned, Artisanal Activity, Even On A Typewriter, Has Now Entered The Central Domain Of Modern Experience Which Is That Of Making Copies, Being Involved In The World Of Duplicates And Machine-mediated Activities.

Photographed Images Do Not Seem To Be Statements About The World So Much As Pieces Of It, Miniatures Of Reality That Anyone Can Make Or Acquire

Salter Is A Writer Who Particularly Rewards Those For Whom Reading Is An Intense Pleasure. He Is Among The Very Few North American Writers All Of Whose Work I Want To Read, Whose As-yet-unpublished Books I Wait For Impatiently.

I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Fiction Which Straddles Narrative And Essay.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, Parliamentary Government, Baroque Churches, Newton, The Emancipation Of Women, Kant, Balanchine Ballets, Et Al. Don’t Redeem What This Particular Civilization Has Wrought Upon The World. The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

War-making Is One Of The Few Activities That People Are Not Supposed To View 'realistically'; That Is, With An Eye To Expense And Practical Outcome. In All-out War, Expenditure Is All-out, Unprudent – War Being Defined As An Emergency In Which No Sacrifice Is Excessive.

In Ny Sensuality Completely Turns Into Sexuality - No Objects For The Senses To Respond To, No Beautiful River, Houses, People. Awful Smells Of The Street, And Dirt... Nothing Except Eating, If That, And The Frenzy Of The Bed.

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

The Traditional Metaphor For A Spiritual Investigation Is That Of The Voyage Or The Journey. From This Image I Must Dissociate Myself. I Do Not Consider Myself A Voyager, I Have Preferred To Stand Still.

Photographs Objectify: They Turn An Event Or A Person Into Something That Can Be Possessed.

I Envy Paranoids; They Actually Feel People Are Paying Attention To Them.

Like The Effects Of Industrial Pollution And The New System Of Global Financial Markets, The Aids Crisis Is Evidence Of A World In Which Nothing Important Is Regional, Local, Limited; In Which Everything That Can Circulate Does, And Every Problem Is, Or Is Destined To Become, Worldwide.

Growing Older Is Mainly An Ordeal Of The Imagination-a Moral Disease, A Social Pathology.

Self-exposure Is Commendable In Art Only When It Is Of A Quality And Complexity That Allows Other People To Learn About Themselves From It.

The Truth Of History Crowds Out The Truth Of Fiction - As If One Were Obliged To Choose Between Them.

[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

She Felt Herself Needing More And More Sleep. When She Awoke In The Morning, She Thought Of When She Might Lie Down Again - And When She Would Sleep. She Started Going To The Movies.

That Even An Apocalypse Can Be Made To Seem Part Of The Ordinary Horizon Of Expectation Constitutes An Unparalleled Violence That Is Being Done To Our Sense Of Reality, To Our Humanity.

People Robbed Of Their Past Seem To Make The Most Fervent Picture Takers, At Home And Abroad.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

Conventions Vs. Spontaneity. This Is A Dialectical Choice, It Depends On The Assessment You Make Of Your Own Times. If You Judge That Your Own Time Is Ridden With Empty Insincere Formalities, You Plump For Spontaneity, For Indecorous Behavior Even...much Of Morality Is The Task Of Compensating For One's Age. One Assumes Unfashionable Virtues, In An Indecorous Time. In A Time Hollowed Out By Decorum, One Must School Oneself In Spontaneity.

Chris Marker Has A Brilliant Mind And Heart And Appetite For Life, And It's A Privilege To Travel With Him To Whatever He Chooses To Remember And To Evoke. He Is One Of Cinema's All Time Greats - The Most Important Reflective Or Non-narrative Filmmaker After Dziga Vertov.

Appetite For Life

The Ideology Of Capitalism Makes Us All Into Connoisseurs Of Liberty - Of The Indefinite Expansion Of Possibility.

One Task Of Literature Is To Formulate Questions And Construct Counterstatements To The Reigning Pieties. And Even When Art Is Not Oppositional, The Arts Gravitate Toward Contrariness. Literature Is Dialogue: Responsiveness. Literature Might Be Described As The History Of Human Responsiveness To What Is Alive And What Is Moribund As Cultures Evolve And Interact With One Another.

Time Exists In Order That Everything Doesn’t Happen All At Once…and Space Exists So That It Doesn’t All Happen To You.

A Photograph Is Both A Pseudo-presence And A Token Of Absence. Like A Wood Fire In A Room, Photographs-especially Those Of People, Of Distant Landscapes And Faraway Cities, Of The Vanished Past-are Incitements To Reverie. The Sense Of The Unattainable That Can Be Evoked By Photographs Feeds Directly Into The Erotic Feelings Of Those For Whom Desirability Is Enhanced By Distance.

Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

I Was Fascinated By Quotations And Lists. And Then I Noticed That Other People Were Fascinated By Quotations And Lists: People As Different As Borges And Walter Benjamin, Novalis And Godard.

Result Of Self-consciousness: Audience And Actor Are The Same. I Live My Life As A Spectacle For Myself, For My Own Edification. I Live My Life But I Don't Live In It. The Hoarding Instinct In Human Relations.

The Unanimously Applauded, Self-congratulatory Bromides Of A Soviet Party Congress Seemed Contemptible. The Unanimity Of The Sanctimonious, Reality-concealing Rhetoric Spouted By American Officials And Media Commentators In Recent Days Seems, Well, Unworthy Of A Mature Democracy.

A Way Of Certifying Experience, Taking Photographs Is Also A Way Of Refusing It - By Limiting Experience To A Search For The Photogenic, By Converting Experience Into An Image, A Souvenir. Travel Becomes A Strategy For Accumulating Photographs.

You Know That You Can't Make References To The Classics Any Longer And Less And Less To The English Classics Even.

The Idea Of Content In Art Is Today Merely A Hindrance, A Nuisance, A Subtle Or Not So Subtle Philistinism.

All My Life I've Been Looking For Someone Intelligent To Talk To.

Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

Taste Has No System And No Proofs.

There Is A Great Deal That Either Has To Be Given Up Or Be Taken Away From You If You Are Going To Succeed In Writing A Body Of Work.

The Becoming Of Man Is The History Of The Exhaustion Of His Possibilities.

As Objects Of Contemplation, Images Of The Atrocious Can Answer To Several Different Needs. To Steel Oneself Against Weakness. To Make Oneself More Numb. To Acknowledge The Existence Of The Incorrigible.

There Is An Understandable Vindictiveness In People Who Come From Communist Countries. They Want To Keep Telling Us That We Were Fools To Think That We Could Make Radical Changes In Our Society. Though I Understand Their Dismay, Respect Their Suffering And Don't Understand The Gullibility Of Some People Who Don't Take In How Repressive These Societies Are, I Still Think It's Important To Keep People Of All Kinds As Active In Civic Matters As Possible.

Our Very Sense Of Situation Is Now Articulated By The Camera's Interventions. The Omnipresence Of Cameras Persuasively Suggests That Time Consists Of Interesting Events, Events Worth Photographing. This, In Turn, Makes It Easy To Feel That Any Event, Once Underway, And Whatever Its Moral Character, Should Be Allowed To Complete Itself - So That Something Else Can Be Brought Into The World, The Photograph.

Strictly Speaking, It Is Doubtful That A Photograph Can Help Us Understand Anything.

To Be An Artist Or A Writer Is To Be This Weird Thing - A Hand Worker In An Era Of Mass Production.

The Felt Unreliability Of Human Experience Brought About By The Inhuman Acceleration Of Historical Change Has Led Every Sensitive Modern Mind To The Recording Of Some Kind Of Nausea, Of Intellectual Vertigo.

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

To Travel Is To Shop.

American Energy. . . Is The Energy Of Violence, Of Free-floating Resentment And Anxiety Unleashed By Chronic Cultural Dislocations Which Must Be, For The Most Part, Ferociously Sublimated. This Energy Has Mainly Been Sublimated Into Crude Materialism

The Photograph Is Like A Quotation, Or A Maxim Or Proverb. Each Of Us Mentally Stocks Hundreds Of Photographs, Subject To Instant Recall.

We Are Ruled By Quotations.

His View Of Time, And Of Change, Has Become That Of Most Elderly People: He Hates Change, Since For Him - For His Body - Any Change Is For The Worse. And If There Is To Be Change, Then He Wants It To Happen Quickly, So It Does Not Use Up Too Much Of The Time Remaining To Him.

A Great Writer Has All 4 - But You Can Still Be A Good Writer With Only 1 And 2.

Using Quotations Was At First Quite Spontaneous For Me, But Then This Use Became Strengthened Through Reflection. But Originally This Practice Came Out Of Temperament.

Making Social Comment Is An Artificial Place For An Artist To Start From. If An Artist Is Touched By Some Social Condition, What The Artist Creates Will Reflect That, But You Can't Force It.

Love Dies Because Its Birth Was An Error.

The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

You Can Include Essay Elements In Fiction; This Is A Very Nineteenth Century Practice.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images — As, According To Proust, Most Ambitious Of Voluntary Prisoners, One Can't Possess The Present But One Can Possessthe Past.

One Cannot Use The Life To Interpret The Work. But One Can Use The Work To Interpret The Life.

Intelligence Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing, Something To Value Or Cultivate. It's More Like A Fifth Wheel - Necessary Or Desirable When Things Break Down. When Things Go Well, It's Better To Be Stupid ... Stupidity Is As Much A Value As Intelligence.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers. The Question Is What To Do With The Feelings That Have Been Aroused, The Knowledge That Has Been Communicated. People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown — If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens — Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

The "happening" Operates By Creating An Asymmetrical Network Of Surprises, Without Climax Or Consummation, This Is The Alogism Of Dreams Rather Than The Logic Of Most Art.

Self-respect. It Would Make Me Lovable. And It's The Secret To Good Sex.

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples.

It's Almost As If This Is The Fundamental Procedure In Modern Society: Duplication And Recycling.

Anything In History Or Nature That Can Be Described As Changing Steadily Can Be Seen As Heading Toward Catastrophe.

The Only Transformation That Interests Me Is A Total Transformation - However Minute

When Something Is Just Bad, It's Often Because It Is Too Mediocre In Its Ambition. The Artist Hasn't Attempted To Do Anything Really Outlandish.

I Didn't Think Of Myself As Importing, I Thought It Was More Interesting To Write About Things People Didn't Know About Than What They Did. When I Became Aware That I Was In Fact "importing", I Stopped Doing It.

A Photograph Is Not Only An Image (as A Painting Is An Image), An Interpretation Of The Real; It Is Also A Trace, Something Directly Stenciled Off The Real, Like A Footprint Or A Death Mask.

All Photographs Aspire To The Condition Of Being Memorable - That Is, Unforgettable.

Painters And Sculptors Under The Nazis Often Depicted The Nude, But They Were Forbidden To Show Any Bodily Imperfections. Their Nudes Look Like Pictures In Physique Magazines: Pinups Which Are Both Sanctimoniously Asexual And (in A Technical Sense) Pornographic, For They Have The Perfection Of A Fantasy.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution. Poignant Longings For Beauty, For An End To Probing Below The Surface, For A Redemption And Celebration Of The Body Of The World. Ultimately, Having An Experience Becomes Identical With Taking A Photograph Of It.

The Past Itself, As Historical Change Continues To Accelerate, Has Become The Most Surreal Of Subjects - Making It Possible... To See A New Beauty In What Is Vanishing.

It's Hard Not To Be Afraid. Be Less Afraid.

Funny Graduation

We Are Told We Must Choose - The Old Or The New. In Fact, We Must Choose Both. What Is A Life If Not A Series Of Negotiations Between The Old And The New?

A Lot Of What I've Written In Criticism Of My Lust For Virtue - My Discovery That I've Committed Idolatry, Making Of The Good An Idol - Is Open To The Charge Of Being Still Caught Within The Dialectic Of Idolatry. I've Made A Moral Criticism Of My Moral Consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

Volume Depends Precisely On The Writer's Having Been Able To Sit In A Room Every Day, Year After Year, Alone.

Between Two Fantasy Alternatives, That Holbein The Younger Had Lived Long Enough To Have Painted Shakespeare Or That A Prototype Of The Camera Had Been Invented Early Enough To Have Photographed Him, Most Bardolators Would Choose The Photograph. This Is Not Just Because It Would Presumably Show What Shakespeare Really Looked Like, For Even If The Photograph Were Faded, Barely Legible, A Brownish Shadow, We Would Probably Still Prefer It To Another Glorious Holbein. Having A Photograph Of Shakespeare Would Be Like Having A Nail From The True Cross.

Books Are Not Only The Arbitrary Sum Of Our Dreams, And Our Memory. They Also Give Us The Model Of Self-transcende Nce.

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

Photography Is, First Of All, A Way Of Seeing.

The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

The Quality Of American Life Is An Insult To The Possibilities Of Human Growth... The Pollution Of American Space, With Gadgetry And Cars And Tv And Box Architecture, Brutalizes The Senses, Making Gray Neurotics Of Most Of Us, And Perverse Spiritual Athletes And Strident Self-transcenders Of The Best Of Us.

The Freakish Is No Longer A Private Zone, Difficult Of Access. People Who Are Bizarre, In Sexual Disgrace, Emotionally Violent Areseen Daily On The Newsstands, On Tv, In The Subways. Hobbesian Man Roams The Streets, Quite Visible, With Glitter In His Hair.

Our Task Is Not To Find The Maximum Amount Of Content In A Work Of Art, Mush Less To Squeeze More Content Out Of The Work Than Is Already There. Our Task Is To Cut Back On Content So We Can See The Thing At All. The Aim Of All Commentary On Art Now Should Be To Make Works Of Art - And, By Analogy, Our Own Experience - More, Rather Than Less, Real To Us.

Tragedy Is A Vision Of Nihilism, A Heroic Or Ennobling Vision Of Nihilism.

When Cartier-bresson Goes To China, He Shows That There Are People In China, And That They Are Chinese.

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

The Most Potent Elements In A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

The Only Story That Seems Worth Writing Is A Cry, A Shot, A Scream. A Story Should Break The Reader's Heart.

In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.

What We Need Is To Use What We Have.

Use It Or Lose It

The Hard Truth Is That What May Be Acceptable In Elite Culture May Not Be Acceptable In Mass Culture, That Tastes Which Pose Only Innocent Ethical Issues As The Property Of A Minority Become Corrupting When They Become More Established. Taste Is Context, And The Context Has Changed.

To Photograph People Is To Violate Them, By Seeing Them As They Never See Themselves, By Having Knowledge Of Them That They Can Never Have; It Turns People Into Objects That Can Be Symbolically Possessed. Just As A Camera Is A Sublimation Of The Gun, To Photograph Someone Is A Subliminal Murder - A Soft Murder, Appropriate To A Sad, Frightened Time.

If There Can Be A Better Way For The Real World To Include The One Of Images, It Will Require An Ecology Not Only Of Real Things But Of Images As Well.

To The Militant, Identity Is Everything.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

I Want To Live As Long As Possible, Just To See How Stupid It Gets.

... Liberal Intellectualstend To Have A Classical Theory Of Politics, In Which The State Has A Monopoly Of Power; Hoping Thatthose In Positions Of Authority May Prove To Be Enlightened Men, Wielding Power Justly, They Are Natural, If Cautious, Allies Of The "establishment.

How Boring Just To Be A Body.

The Young-old Polarization And The Male-female Polarization Are Perhaps The Two Leading Stereotypes That Imprison People.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

The Basic Unit For Contemporary Art Is Not The Idea, But The Analysis Of And Extension Of Sensations.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable. It Is Nowhere So Durable As Artistic Or Intellectual Beauty. Moral Beauty Has A Tendency To Decay Very Rapidly Into Sententiousness Or Untimeliness.

It Is A Nostalgic Time Right Now, And Photographs Actively Promote Nostalgia. Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos. ... All Photographs Are Memento Mori. To Take Photograph Is To Participate In Another Person's Mortality, Vulnerability, Mutability. Precisely By Slicing Out This Moment And Freezing It, All Photographs Testify To Time's Relentless Melt

The Only Ideals Allowed Are Healthy Ones - Those Everyone May Aspire To, Or Comfortably Imagine Oneself Possessing.

One Can Know Worlds One Has Not Experienced, Choose A Response To Life That Has Never Been Offered, Create An Inwardness Utterly Strong And Fruitful.

Desire Has No History.

Today Is Such A Time, When The Project Of Interpretation Is Largely Reactionary, Stifling. Like The Fumes Of The Automobile And Of Heavy Industry Which Befoul The Urban Atmosphere, The Effusion Of Interpretations Of Art Today Poisons Our Sensibilities. In A Culture Whose Already Classical Dilemma Is The Hypertrophy Of The Intellect At The Expense Of Energy And Sensual Capability, Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art.

The Way In Which A Certain Kind Of Political Idealism Has Been Discredited And Scorned Makes The Danger Not That Intellectuals Keep On Making Fools Of Themselves, Formulating Political Opinions When They Might Not Be As Informed As They Might Be, But That They Retreat And Leave Politics To The Professionals.

Political Opinions

Nobody Ever Discovered Ugliness Through Photographs. But Many, Through Photographs, Have Discovered Beauty.

Few Ever See What Is Not Already Inside Their Heads.

Self-censorship, The Most Important And Most Successful Form Of Censorship, Is Rampant. Debate Is Identified With Dissent, Which Is In Turn Identified With Disloyalty. There Is A Widespread Feeling That, In This New, Open-ended Emergency, We May Not Be Able To 'afford' Our Traditional Freedoms.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers.

Total Experiences, Of Which There Are Many Kinds, Tend Again And Again To Be Apprehended Only As Revivals Or Translations Of The Religious Imagination. To Try To Make A Fresh Way Of Talking At The Most Serious, Ardent, And Enthusiastic Level, Heading Off The Religious Encapsulation, Is One Of The Primary Intellectual Tasks Of Future Thought.

Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.

But I Cannot Forgive Those Who Did Not Care About More Than Their Own Glory Or Well-being. They Thought They Were Civilized. They Were Despicable. Damn Them All.

Despite The Illusion Of Giving Understanding, What Seeing Through Photographs Really Invites Is An Acquisitive Relation To The World That Nourishes Aesthetic Awareness And Promotes Emotional Detachment.

The Photographer's Intentions Do Not Determine The Meaning Of A Photograph, Which Will Have Its Own Career, Blown By The Whims And Loyalties Of The Diverse Communities That Have Use For It.

I Discovered That I Am Tired Of Being A Person. Not Just Tired Of Being The Person I Was, But Any Person At All

Modern Discussions Of The Possibility Of Tragedy Are Not Exercises In Literary Analysis; They Are Exercises In Cultural Diagnostics, More Or Less Disguised.

Even More Than Comparing Society To A Family, Comparing It To A Body Makes An Authoritarian Ordering Of Society Seem Inevitable, Immutable.

The Two Ideas Are Antithetical. Insofar As Photography Is (or Should Be) About The World, The Photographer Counts For Little, But Insofar As It Is The Instrument Of Intrepid, Questioning Subjectivity, The Photographer Is All.

The Photographer Is An Armed Version Of The Solitary Walker Reconnoitering, Stalking, Cruising The Urban Inferno, The Voyeuristic Stroller Who Discovers The City As A Landscape Of Voluptuous Extremes. Adept Of The Joys Of Watching, Connoisseur Of Empathy, The Flâneur Finds The World 'picturesque.

Any Critic Is Entitled To Wrong Judgments, Of Course. But Certain Lapses Of Judgment Indicate The Radical Failure Of An Entire Sensibility.

There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

Can I Love Someone...and Still Think/fly? Love Is Flying, Sown, Floating. Thought Is Solitary Flight, Beating Wings.

I Haven't Been Everywhere, But It's On My List.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

Enemies Are Somewhere Else, As The Fighting Is Almost Always “over There,” With Islamic Fundamentalism Now Replacing Russian And Chinese Communism As The Implacable, Furtive Menace. And “terrorist” Is A More Flexible Word Than “communist.” It Can Unify A Larger Number Of Quite Different Struggles And Interests. What This May Mean Is That The War Will Be Endless---since There Will Always Be Some Terrorism.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

Nothing Is Mysterious, No Human Relation. Except Love.

With The Modern Diseases (once Tb, Now Cancer) The Romantic Idea That The Disease Expresses The Character Is Invariably Extended To Assert That The Character Causes The Disease -- Because It Has Not Expressed Itself. Passion Moves Inward, Striking And Blighting The Deepest Cellular Recesses.

The Particular Qualities And Intentions Of Photographs Tend To Be Swallowed Up In The Generalized Pathos Of Time Past.

To Take A Photograph Is To Participate In Another Person's Mortality, Vulnerability, Mutability. Precisely By Slicing Out This Moment And Freezing It, All Photographs Testify To Time's Relentless Melt.

War Tears, Rends. War Rips Open, Eviscerates. War Scorches. War Dismembers. War Ruins.

Where Once It Was The Physician Who Waged Bellum Contra Morbum, The War Against Disease, Now It's The Whole Society.

One Of The Author's Most Ancient Roles Is To Call The Community To Account For Its Hypocrisies And Bad Faith.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick. Although We All Prefer To Use Only The Good Passport, Sooner Or Later Each Of Us Is Obliged, At Least For A Spell, To Identify Ourselves As Citizens Of That Other Place.

All Great Art Contains At Its Center Contemplation, A Dynamic Contemplation.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art. Even More. It Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon The World. To Interpret Is To Impoverish, To Deplete The World -- In Order To Set Up A Shadow World Of ''meanings.''

We Live Under Continual Threat Of Two Equally Fearful, But Seemingly Opposed Destinies: Unremitting Banality And Inconceivable Terror. It Is Fantasy, Served Out In Large Rations By The Popular Arts, Which Allows Most People To Cope With These Twin Specters.

To Me, Literature Is A Calling, Even A Kind Of Salvation. It Connects Me With An Enterprise That Is Over 2,000 Years Old. What Do We Have From The Past? Art And Thought. That’s What Lasts. That’s What Continues To Feed People And Give Them An Idea Of Something Better.

... The Place We Assign To Pornography Depends On The Goals We Set For Our Own Consciousness, Our Own Experience.

All Understanding Begins With Our Not Accepting The World As It Appears.

Being In Love Means Being Willing To Ruin Yourself For The Other Person.

In Place Of A Hermeneutics We Need An Erotics Of Art.

I Like To Feel Dumb. That’s How I Know There’s More In The World Than Me.

To Patronize The Faculty Of Taste Is To Patronize Oneself. For Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response.

I Can't Say I Know How To Change The Society, But I Share The Feeling That This Society Is Full Of Technology Which Depersonalizes People, Which Seems To Drain A Sense Of Reality From Our Lives. It's Full Of A Lot Of Other Things Too.

Camp Is A Solvent Of Morality. It Neutralizes Moral Indignation, Sponsors Playfulness.

Moral Indignation

Art Is The Most General Condition Of The Past In The Present. ... Perhaps No Work Of Art Is Art. It Can Only Become Art, When It Is Part Of The Past. In This Normative Sense, A 'contemporary' Work Of Art Would Be A Contradiction - Except So Far As We Can, In The Present, Assimilate The Present To The Past.

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

If An Irreducible Distinction Between Theatre And Cinema Does Exist, It May Be This: Theatre Is Confined To A Logical Or Continuous Use Of Space. Cinemahas Access To An Alogical Or Discontinuous Use Of Space.

Victims Suggest Innocence. And Innocence, By The Inexorable Logic That Governs All Relational Terms, Suggests Guilt.

I Feel Inauthentic At A Party. ... Going To A Party Is A 'low' Activity - The Authentic Self Is Compromised, Fragmented - One Plays 'roles.' One Isn't Fully Present, Beyond Role-playing. One Doesn't (can't) Tell The Full Truth, Which Means One Is Lying, Even If One Doesn't Literally Tell Lies.

Time Eventually Positions Most Photographs, Even The Most Amateurish, At The Level Of Art.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. Or They Enlarge A Reality That Is Felt To Be Shrunk, Hollowed Out, Perishable, Remote. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images.

The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.

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