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I Perceive Value, I Confer Value, I Create Value, I Even Create — Or Guarantee — Existence. Hence, My Compulsion To Make “lists.” The Things (beethoven’s Music, Movies, Business Firms) Won’t Exist Unless I Signify My Interest In Them By At Least Noting Down Their Names. Nothing Exists Unless I Maintain It (by My Interest, Or My Potential Interest). This Is An Ultimate, Mostly Subliminal Anxiety. Hence, I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

-Susan Sontag

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I Perceive Value, I

Susan Sontag

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I Perceive Value, I Confer Value, I Create Value, I Even Create — Or Guarantee — Existence. Hence, My Compulsion To Make “lists.” The Things (beethoven’s Music, Movies, Business Firms) Won’t Exist Unless I Signify My Interest In Them By At Least Noting Down Their Names. Nothing Exists Unless I Maintain It (by My Interest, Or My Potential Interest). This Is An Ultimate, Mostly Subliminal Anxiety. Hence, I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

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The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.

I Want To Be Able To Be Alone, To Find It Nourishing - Not Just A Waiting.

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

The Destiny Of Photography Has Taken It Far Beyond The Role To Which It Was Originally Thought To Be Limited: To Give More Accurate Reports On Reality (including Works Of Art). Photography Is The Reality; The Real Object Is Often Experienced As A Letdown.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves. The Very Working Of This Economic System, Which Has Bestowed These Unprecedented Liberties, Most Cherished In The Form Of Physical Mobility And Material Prosperity, Depends On Encouraging People To Defy Limits.

A Good Listener: A Physical Presence That Is Warm, Alert, Intelligent - More Important Than Any Words.

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

Read A Lot. Expect Something Big, Something Exalting Or Deepening From A Book. No Book Is Worth Reading That Isn't Worth Re-reading.

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

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.

Instead Of Just Recording Reality, Photographs Have Become The Norm For The Way Things Appear To Us, Thereby Changing The Very Idea Of Reality And Of Realism.

The Creative Phase Of An Idea Coincides With The Period During Which It Insists, Cantankerously, On Its Boundaries, On What Makes It Different; But An Idea Becomes False And Impotent When It Seeks Reconciliation, At Cut-rate Prices, With Other Ideas.

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

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

It's Beginnings That Are Hard. I Always Begin With A Great Sense Of Dread And Trepidation. Nietzsche Says That The Decision To Start Writing Is Like Leaping Into A Cold Lake.

Using A Camera Appeases The Anxiety Which The Work-driven Feel About Not Working When They Are On Vacation And Supposed To Be Having Fun. They Have Something To Do That Is Like A Friendly Imitation Of Work: They Can Take Pictures.

Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.

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

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.

The Question Of The Social Uses Of Photography Opens Out Into The Very Largest Issues Of The Self, Of The Relationship To Community, To Reality.

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.

No 'we' Should Be Taken For Granted When The Subject Is Looking At Other People's Pain.

Fear Binds People Together. And Fear Disperses Them. Courage Inspires Communities: The Courage Of An Example - For Courage Is As Contagious As Fear. But Courage, Certain Kinds Of Courage, Can Also Isolate The Brave.

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.

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.

It's Not That You Make Up Your Ideas To Justify Your Temperament But That It's The Temperament First.

The Principal Instances Of Mass Violence In The World Today Are Those Committed By Governments Within Their Own Legally Recognized Borders.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

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

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.

To Emphasize Style Is To Slight Content, Or To Introduce An Attitude Which Is Neutral With Respect To Content.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World.

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

Life Is Not Significant Details, Illuminated By A Flash, Fixed Forever. Photographs Are.

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

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

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

Pornography Is One Of The Branches Of Literature - Science Fiction Is Another - Aiming At Disorientation, At Psychic Dislocation.

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.

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.

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.

The Possession Of A Camera Can Inspire Something Akin To Lust. And Like All Credible Forms Of Lust, It Cannot Be Satisfied.

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.

Taste Has No System And No Proofs.

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

The Fantasies Inspired By Tb In The Last Century, By Cancer Now, Are Responses To A Disease Thought To Be Intractable And Capricious--that Is, A Disease Not Understood--in An Era In Which Medicine's Central Premise Is That All Diseases Can Be Cured.

Although Photography Generates Works That Can Be Called Art-it Requires Subjectivity, It Can Lie, It Gives Aesthetic Pleasure-photography Is Not, To Begin With, An Art Form At All. Like Language, It Is A Medium In Which Works Of Art (among Other Things) Are Made.

... 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.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

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

I Was Not Looking For My Dreams To Interpret My Life, But Rather For My Life To Interpret My Dreams.

Follow Your Dreams

I Was Enthralled And Moved By Azar Nafisi's Account Of How She Defied, And Helped Others To Defy, Radical Islam's War Against Women. Her Memoir Contains Important And Properly Complex Reflections About The Ravages Of Theocracy, About Thoughtfulness, And About The Ordeals Of Freedom-as Well As A Stirring Account Of The Pleasures And Deepening Of Consciousness That Result From An Encounter With Great Literature And With An Inspired Teacher.

Fatal Illness Has Always Been Viewed As A Test Of Moral Character, But In The Nineteenth Century There Is A Great Reluctance To Let Anybody Flunk The Test.

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

The Problems Of This World Are Only Truly Solved In Two Ways: By Extinction Or Duplication.

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.

There Are More And More Taboos About Calling Something, Anything, Ugly.

The Feminist Movement Has Been Important To Me Because It's Made Me Feel Less Odd And Also Because It Has Made Me Understand Some Of The Pressures On Women Which I Was Lucky Enough To Have Escaped, Perhaps Because Of My Eccentricity Or The Oddness Of My Upbringing.

'camp' Is A Vision Of The World In Terms Of Style - But A Particular Style. It Is The Love Of The Exaggerated.

Aids Occupies Such A Large Part In Our Awareness Because Of What It Has Been Taken To Represent. It Seems The Very Model Of All The Catastrophes Privileged Populations Feel Await Them.

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

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.

Music Is At Once The Most Wonderful, The Most Alive Of All The Arts- It Is The Most Abstract, The Most Perfect, The Most Pure- And The Most Sensual. I Listen With My Body And It Is My Body That Aches In Response To The Passion And Pathos Embodied In This Music.

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

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

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.

When You Are Writing, You Are - From Society's Point Of View - Only Producing The First Version Which Will Then Be Processed And Recycled.

The Easiest Thing In The World For Me Is To Pay Attention.

In Every Society, The Definitions Of Sanity And Madness Are Arbitrary - Are, In The Largest Sense, Political.

Literature Can Train, And Exercise, Our Ability To Weep For Those Who Are Not Us Or Ours.

Any Sensibility Which Can Be Crammed Into The Mold Of A System, Or Handled With The Rough Tools Of Proof, Is No Longer Sensibility At All. It Has Hardened Into An Idea.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

The Capacity To Be Overwhelmed By The Beautiful Is Astonishingly Sturdy And Survives Amidst The Harshest Distractions.

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

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.

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

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.

A Family's Photograph Album Is Generally About The Extended Family And, Often, Is All That Remains Of It.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

Tamed As It May Be, Sexuality Remains One Of The Demonic Forces In Human Consciousness - Pushing Us At Intervals Close To Taboo And Dangerous Desires, Which Range From The Impulse To Commit Sudden Arbitrary Violence Upon Another Person To The Voluptuous Yearning For The Extinction Of One's Consciousness, For Death Itself. Even On The Level Of Simple Physical Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles Having An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

This Is The Beauty That Emerges From Self-confidence, Class Confidence. That Says, I Am Not Born To Please. I Am Born To Be Pleased.

Self Confidence

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.

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

Depression Is Melancholy Minus Its Charms - The Animation, The Fits.

In Photographing Dwarfs, You Don't Get Majesty & Beauty. You Get Dwarfs.

The Life Of The Creative Man Is Lead, Directed And Controlled By Boredom. Avoiding Boredom Is One Of Our Most Important Purposes.

To Photograph Is To Appropriate The Thing Photographed. It Means Putting Oneself Into A Certain Relation To The World That Feels Like Knowledge-and Therefore, Like Power.

To Camp Is A Mode Of Seduction... Behind The 'straight' Public Sense In Which Something Can Be Taken, One Has Found A Private Zany Experience Of The Thing.

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

To Collect Photographs Is To Collect The World.

Reading Usually Precedes Writing. And The Impulse To Write Is Almost Always Fired By Reading. Reading, The Love Of Reading, Is What Makes You Dream Of Becoming A Writer.

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Much Of Modern Art Is Devoted To Lowering The Threshold Of What Is Terrible. By Getting Us Used To What, Formerly, We Could Not Bear To See Or Hear, Because It Was Too Shocking, Painful, Or Embarrassing, Art Changes Morals.

[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.

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.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

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.

Writers Are Makers, Not Just Transmitters, Of Myths. Literature Offers Not Only Myths But Counter-myths, Just As Life Offers Counter-experiences - Experiences That Confound What You Thought You Thought, Or Felt, Or Believed.

I Perceive Value, I Confer Value, I Create Value, I Even Create — Or Guarantee — Existence. Hence, My Compulsion To Make “lists.” The Things (beethoven’s Music, Movies, Business Firms) Won’t Exist Unless I Signify My Interest In Them By At Least Noting Down Their Names. Nothing Exists Unless I Maintain It (by My Interest, Or My Potential Interest). This Is An Ultimate, Mostly Subliminal Anxiety. Hence, I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

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.

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

All Struggle, All Resistance Is -- Must Be -- Concrete. And All Struggle Has A Global Resonance. If Not Here, Then There. If Not Now, Then Soon. Elsewhere As Well As Here.

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

In The Twentieth Century, The Repellent, Harrowing Disease That Is Made The Index Of A Superior Sensitivity, The Vehicle Of "spiritual" Feelings And "critical" Discontent, Is Insanity.

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.

Instead Of Expecting All And Being Lowered Into Despair Each Time I Get Less, I Expect Nothing Now And, Occasionally, I Get A Little, And Am More Than A Little Happy.

To Read Was Precisely To Enter Another World, Which Was Not The Reader's Own, And Come Back Refreshed, Ready To Bear With Equanimity The Injustices And Frustrations Of This One. Reading Was Balm, Amusement Not Incitement.

The Truth Is Always Something That Is Told, Not Something That Is Known. If There Were No Speaking Or Writing, There Would Be No Truth About Anything. There Would Only Be What Is.

The Wisdom Of Literature Is Quite Antithetical To Having Opinions. 'nothing Is My Last Word About Anything,' Said Henry James. Furnishing Opinions, Even Correct Opinions - Whenever Asked - Cheapens What Novelists And Poets Do Best, Which Is To Sponsor Reflectiveness, To Pursue Complexity. Information Will Never Replace Illumination.

Some Of The Exuberance Of My Essay-writing Has Gone Because I'm Worried About The Uses They Could Serve.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

Ours Is A Culture Based On Excess, On Overproduction; The Result Is A Steady Loss Of Sharpness In Our Sensory Experience. All The Conditions Of Modern Life - Its Material Plenitude, Its Sheer Crowdedness - Conjoin To Dull Our Sensory Faculties

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

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.

Religion Is Probably, After Sex, The Second Oldest Resource Which Human Beings Have Available To Them For Blowing Their Minds.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

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

We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).

Cancer Patients Are Lied To, Not Just Because The Disease Is (or Is Thought To Be) A Death Sentence, But Because It Is Felt To Be Obscene - In The Original Meaning Of That Word: Ill-omened, Abominable, Repugnant To The Senses.

Everything Should Be Understood, And Anything Can Be Transformed - That Is The Modern View.

I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

In America, The Photographer Is Not Simply The Person Who Records The Past, But The One Who Invents It.

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.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. That Means Trying To Understand, Take In, Connect With, What Wickedness Human Beings Are Capable Of; And Not Be Corrupted - Made Cynical, Superficial - By This Understanding.

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.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

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

America Was Founded On A Genocide, On The Unquestioned Assumption Of The Right Of White Europeans To Exterminate A Resident, Technologically Backward, Colored Population In Order To Take Over The Continent.

Photographs May Be More Memorable Than Moving Images, Because They Are A Neat Slice Of Time, Not A Flow. Each Still Photograph Is A Privileged Moment Turned Into A Slim Object That One Can Keep And Look At Again.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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

It Is The Action Of Bodies On Bodies, Not Bodies On Minds, Which The Crowd Enjoys.

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

Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

One Doesn't Need To Know The Artist's Private Intentions. The Work Tells All.

...to Be A Poet, Requires A Mythology Of The Self. The Self Described Is The Poet Self, To Which The Daily Self (and Others) Are Often Ruthlessly Sacrificed. The Poet Self Is The Real Self, The Other One Is The Carrier; And When The Poet Self Dies, The Person Dies.

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.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart. It Enlarges Your Sense Of Human Possibility What Human Nature Is Of What Happens In The World. It's A Creator Of Inwardness.

War Is Elective. It Is Not An Inevitable State Of Affairs. War Is Not The Weather.

Nothing Is Mysterious, No Human Relation. Except Love.

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

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

I Belong Rather To A More Classical Tradition Of Social Analysis.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

It Is Not Suffering As Such That Is Most Deeply Feared But Suffering That Degrades.

World Suffering

The Ratio Of Authentic Literature To Trash In Pornography May Be Somewhat Lower Than The Ratio Of Novels Of Genuine Literary Meritto The Entire Volume Of Sub-literary Fiction Produced For Mass Taste. But It Is Probably Not Lower Than, For Instance, That Of Another Somewhat Shady Sub-genre With A Few First-rate Books To Its Credit, Science Fiction.

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.

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?

Ours Is An Age Which Consciously Pursues Health, And Yet Only Believes In The Reality Of Sickness.

The Writer Is Either A Practicing Recluse Or A Delinquent, Guilt-ridden One--or Both. Usually Both.

Again: There Is Nothing Inherently Superior About Resistance. All Our Claims For The Righteousness Of Resistance Rest On The Rightness Of The Claim That The Resisters Are Acting In The Name Of Justice. And The Justice Of The Cause Does Not Depend On, And Is Not Enhanced By, The Virtue Of Those Who Make The Assertion. It Depends First And Last On The Truth Of A Description Of A State Of Affairs That Is, Truly, Unjust And Unnecessary.

Ideas Disturb The Levelness Of Life

A Personality Is Our Way Of Being For Others. We Hope That Others Will Meet Us Half Way Or More, Gratify Our Needs, Be Our Audience, Soothe Our Fears.

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

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

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.

I Have To Come Out Of The Closet Of The Third Person And Speak In A More Direct Way.

A Fiction About Soft Or Easy Deaths Is Part Of The Mythology Of Most Diseases That Are Not Considered Shameful Or Demeaning.

Aids Obliges People To Think Of Sex As Having, Possibly, The Direst Consequences: Suicide. Or Murder.

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

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 Work Of Art Itself Is . . . A Vibrant, Magical, And Exemplary Object Which Returns Us To The World In Some Way More Open And Enriched.

Mallarme Said That Everything In The World Exists In Order To End In A Book. Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

In The Greatest Art, One Is Always Aware Of Things That Cannot Be Said. . .of The Contradiction Between Expression And The Presence Of The Inexpressible. Stylistic Devices Are Also Techniques Of Avoidance. The Most Potent Elements Of A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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

I Am Profoundly Uncertain How To Write. I Know What I Love And What I Like, Because It's A Direct Passionate Response. But When I Write, I'm Very Uncertain Whether It's Good Enough. That Is, Of Course, The Writer's Agony.

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History; It Is The White Race And It Alone — Its Ideologies And Inventions — Which Eradicates Autonomous Civilizations Wherever It Spreads, Which Has Upset The Ecological Balance Of The Planet, Which Now Threatens The Very Existence Of Life Itself.

Camp Taste Turns Its Back On The Good-bad Axis Of Ordinary Aesthetic Judgment. Camp Doesn't Reverse Things. It Doesn't Argue That The Good Is Bad, Or The Bad Is Good. What It Does Is To Offer For Art, And Life, A Different - A Supplementary - Set Of Standards.

Gide And I Have Attained Such Perfect Intellectual Communion That I Experience The Appropriate Labor Pains For Every Thought He Gives Birth To!

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.

Photographs Trade Simultaneously On The Prestige Of Art And The Magic Of The Real.

Cameras Began Duplicating The World At That Moment When The Human Landscape Started To Undergo A Vertiginous Rate Of Change: While An Untold Number Of Forms Of Biological And Social Life Are Being Destroyed In A Brief Span Of Time, A Device Is Available To Record What Is Disappearing.

There Are Some Elements In Life - Above All, Sexual Pleasure - About Which It Isn't Necessary To Have A Position.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable.

Physical Beauty

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

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.

The Decline Of Education In North America And I Suppose In Western Europe Makes It Harder To Have A Common Body Of References.

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

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.

A Photograph Comes Into Being, As It Is Seen, All At Once.

That Sort Of Reception - Where Everything Is Assimilated To The World Of Celebrity - Makes Me Dream Of Becoming A More Recalcitrant, Harder To Assimilate Writer.

The Fear Of Aids Imposes On An Act Whose Ideal Is An Experience Of Pure Presentness (and A Creation Of The Future) A Relation To The Past To Be Ignored At One's Peril. Sex No Longer Withdraws Its Partners, If Only For A Moment, From The Social. It Cannot Be Considered Just A Coupling; It Is A Chain, A Chain Of Transmission, From The Past.

Fewer And Fewer Americans Possess Objects That Have A Patina, Old Furniture, Grandparents Pots And Pans - The Used Things, Warm With Generations Of Human Touch, Essential To A Human Landscape. Instead, We Have Our Paper Phantoms, Transistorized Landscapes. A Featherweight Portable Museum.

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.

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.

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.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

I Think That There Is Generally Less Of A Community And That The Fragmentation Of The Left Is A Symptom. I Think That It Is Less And Less Possible To Take For Granted Certain Cultural References.

Camp Is Art That Proposes Itself Seriously, But Cannot Be Taken Altogether Seriously Because It Is 'too Much.

I Don’t Care About Someone Being Intelligent; Any Situation Between People, When They Are Really Human With Each Other, Produces ‘intelligence.

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

An Important Job Of The Critic Is To Savage What Is Mediocre Or Meretricious.

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 Don't Write Because There's An Audience. I Write Because There Is Literature.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism -- Victimless Collecting, As It Were... In A World That Is Well On Its Way To Becoming One Vast Quarry, The Collector Becomes Someone Engaged In A Pious Work Of Salvage. The Course Of Modern History Having Already Sapped The Traditions And Shattered The Living Wholes In Which Precious Objects Once Found Their Place, The Collector May Now In Good Conscience Go About Excavating The Choicer, More Emblematic Fragments.

Although None Of The Rules For Becoming More Alive Is Valid, It Is Healthy To Keep On Formulating Them.

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

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