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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.

-Susan Sontag

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Result Of Self-consciousness: Audience

Susan Sontag

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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.

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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.

Anthropology Has Always Struggled With An Intense, Fascinated Repulsion Towards Its Subject.... [the Anthropologist] Submits Himself To The Exotic To Confirm His Own Inner Alienation As An Urban Intellectual.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

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.

My Idea Of A Writer: Someone Interested In Everything.

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

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.

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.

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

Persons Who Merely Have-a-life Customarily Move In A Dense Fluid. That's How They're Able To Conduct Their Lives At All. Their Living Depends On Not Seeing.

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

Interpretation, Based On The Highly Dubious Theory That A Work Of Art Is Composed Of Items Of Content, Violates Art. It Makes Art Into An Article For Use, For Arrangement Into A Mental Scheme Of Categories.

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.

I Want To Save My Soul, That Timid Wind.

What, I Ask, Drives Me To Disorder? How Can I Diagnose Myself? All I Feel, Most Immediately, Is The Most Anguished Need For Physical Love And Mental Companionship -

What Pornography Is Really About, Ultimately, Isn't Sex But Death.

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

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.

Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

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.

Along With People Who Pretty Themselves For The Camera, The Unattractive And The Disaffected Have Been Assigned Their Beauty.

Science Fiction Films Are Not About Science. They Are About Disaster, Which Is One Of The Oldest Subjects Of Art.

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.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

As Industrialization Provided Social Uses For The Operations Of The Photographer, So The Reaction Against These Uses Reinforced The Self-consciousness Of Photography-as-art.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

Like The Collector, The Photographer Is Animated By A Passion That, Even When It Appears To Be For The Present, Is Linked To A Sense Of The Past.

We Are Ruled By Quotations.

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

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.

One Could Plausibly Argue That It Is For Quite Sound Reasons That The Whole Capacity For Sexual Ecstasy Is Inaccessible To Most People - Given That Sexuality Is Something, Like Nuclear Energy, Which May Prove Amenable To Domestication Through Scruple, But Then Again May Not.

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

We Live In A Culture In Which Intelligence Is Denied Relevance Altogether, In A Search For Radical Innocence, Or Is Defended As An Instrument Of Authority And Repression. In My View, The Only Intelligence Worth Defending Is Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying.

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

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

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

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.

The Fact That Illness Is Associated With The Poor --who Are, From The Perspective Of The Privileged, Aliens In One's Midst --reinforces The Association Of Illness With The Foreign With An Exotic, Often Primitive Place.

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.

Etymologically, 'patient' Means Sufferer.

Our Appreciations, It Was Felt, Could Be So Much More Inclusive If We Said That Something, Instead Of Being Beautiful, Was 'interesting'.

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

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

I Make An Idol Of My Moral Consciousness. My Pursuit Of The Good Is Corrupted By The Sin Of Idolatry.

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 Discovery Of The Good Taste Of Bad Taste Can Be Very Liberating. The Man Who Insists On High And Serious Pleasures Is Depriving Himself Of Pleasure; He Continually Restricts What He Can Enjoy; In The Constant Exercise Of His Good Taste He Will Eventually Price Himself Out Of The Market, So To Speak. Here Camp Taste Supervenes Upon Good Taste As A Daring And Witty Hedonism. It Makes The Man Of Good Taste Cheerful, Where Before He Ran The Risk Of Being Chronically Frustrated. It Is Good For The Digestion.

Reality Has Come To Seem More And More Like What We Are Shown By Cameras.

With More People, There Are More Voices To Tune Out.

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.

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

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.

To Make Your Life Being A Writer, It's An Auto-slavery ... You Are Both The Slave And The Task-master.

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

It's A Pleasure To Share One's Memories. Everything Remembered Is Dear, Endearing, Touching, Precious. At Least The Past Is Safe Though We Didn't Know It At The Time. We Know It Now. Because It's In The Past; Because We Have Survived.

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.

Illness Is The Night-side Of Life, A More Onerous Citizenship. Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick.

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.

Is It The Obligation Of Great Art To Be Continually Interesting? I Think Not.

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

Images Anesthetize. An Event Known Through Photographs Certainly Becomes More Real Than It Would Have Been If One Had Never Seen The Photographs ... But After Repeated Exposure To Images It Also Becomes Less Real. ... 'concerned' Photography Has Done At Least As Much To Deaden Conscience As To Arouse It.

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.

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

Physical Beauty

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 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.

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.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

I Urge You To Be As Impudent As You Dare. Be Bold, Be Bold, Be Bold.

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

By Furnishing This Already Crowded World With A Duplicate One Of Images, Photography Makes Us Feel That The World Is More Available Than It Really Is.

Needing To Have Reality Confirmed And Experience Enhanced By Photographs Is An Aesthetic Consumerism To Which Everyone Is Now Addicted. Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution.

Time May Enhance What Seems Simply Dogged Or Lacking In Fantasy Now Because We Are Too Close To It, Because It Resembles Too Closely Our Own Everyday Fantasies, The Fantastic Nature Of Which We Don't Perceive. We Are Better Able To Enjoy A Fantasy As A Fantasy When It Is Not Our Own.

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. The Function Of Criticism Should Be To Show How It Is What It Is, Even That It Is What It Is, Rather Than To Show What It Means.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

The Public Voice In The Theater Today Is Crude And Raucous, And, All Too Often, Weak-minded.

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.

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

Unrequited Love

Ultimately Ideas Come Out Of A Temperament Or A Sensibility, They Are A Crystallization Or A Precipitation Of Temperament.

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.

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

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 Notion Of Art As The Dearly Purchased Outcome Of An Immense Spiritual Risk, One Whose Cost Goes Up With The Entry And Participation Of Each New Player In The Game.

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.

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

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

Funny Graduation

Photographs Shock Insofar As They Show Something Novel.

When You See Your 40-page Essay Turned Into A "hot Tip" In One Paragraph In Newsweek, You Get Anxious About The Way Your Writing Has Been Used.

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.

The Point Is To Get A Good Rhythm, To Make It Mindless, Almost As A Daydream. To Walk Like Breathing. To Make It What The Body Wants, What The Air Wants, What Time Wants.

It Hurts To Love. It's Like Giving Yourself To Be Flayed And Knowing That At Any Moment The Other Person May Just Walk Off With Your Skin.

To Suffer Is One Thing; Another Thing Is Living With The Photographed Images Of Suffering, Which Does Not Necessarily Strengthen Conscience And The Ability To Be Compassionate. It Can Also Corrupt Them. Once One Has Seen Such Images, One Has Started Down The Road Of Seeing More - And More. Images Transfix. Images Anesthetize.

A Large Part Of The Popularity And Persuasiveness Of Psychology Comes From Its Being A Sublimated Spiritualism: A Secular, Ostensibly Scientific Way Of Affirming The Primacy Of "spirit" Over Matter.

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

It Is Not Altogether Wrong To Say That There Is No Such Thing As A Bad Photograph - Only Less Interesting, Less Relevant, Less Mysterious Ones.

You Have To Sink Way Down To A Level Of Hopelessness And Desperation To Find The Book That You Can Write.

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

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?

... 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.

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

Norman Mailer In His Writings Is Ultimately More Concerned With Success Than With Danger; Danger Is Only A Means To Success.

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.

If Literature Has Engaged Me As A Project, First As A Reader, Then As A Writer, It Is As An Extension Of My Sympathies To Other Selves, Other Domains, Other Dreams, Other Territories.

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.

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

Someone Who Is Perennially Surprised That Depravity Exists, Who Continues To Feel Disillusioned (even Incredulous) When Confronted With Evidence Of What Humans Are Capable Of Inflicting In The Way Of Gruesome, Hands-on Cruelties Upon Other Humans, Has Not Reached Moral Or Psychological Adulthood.

Art Today Is A New Kind Of Instrument, An Instrument For Modifying Consciousness And Organizing New Modes Of Sensibility . . . . Artists Have Had To Become Self-conscious Aestheticians: Continually Challenging Their Means, Their Materials And Methods.

I Do Not Think White America Is Committed To Granting Equality To The American Negro... This Is A Passionately Racist Country; It Will Continue To Be So In The Foreseeable Future.

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

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

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.

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

Currently Intellectuals In Western Europe And North America Are Extremely Demoralized And Shaken By The Rise Of A Virulent Conservative Tendency (which Some Have Even Joined).

Most People In This Society Who Aren't Actively Mad Are, At Best, Reformed Or Potential Lunatics.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves.

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

For Those Who Live Neither With Religious Consolations About Death Nor With A Sense Of Death (or Of Anything Else) As Natural, Death Is The Obscene Mystery, The Ultimate Affront, The Thing That Cannot Be Controlled. It Can Only Be Denied.

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

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

What Seems Distinctively Modern As A Unit Of Thought, Of Art, Of Discourse Is The Fragment; And The Quotation Is One Kind Of Fragment.

When Comedy Fails, Seriousness Begins To Leak Back In.

The Truth Is Balance. However The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

Art Is Not Only About Something; It Is Something. A Work Of Art Is A Thing In The World, Not Just A Text Or Commentary On The World.

Surrealism Is A Bourgeois Disaffection; That Its Militants Thought It Universal Is Only One Of The Signs That It Is Typically Bourgeois.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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

A Work Of Art, So Far As It Is A Work Of Art, Cannot - Whatever The Artist's Personal Intention - Advocate Anything At All.

As Photographs Give People An Imaginary Possession Of A Past That Is Unreal, They Also Help People To Take Possession Of Space In Which They Are Insecure.

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.

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.

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never Worry About Being Obsessive. I Like Obsessive People. Obsessive People Make Great Art

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 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.

The Romantic Treatment Of Death Asserts That People Were Made Singular, Made More Interesting, By Their Illnesses.

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.

To Us, The Difference Between The #‎ Photographer As An Individual Eye And The Photographer As An Objective Recorder Seems Fundamental, The Difference Often Regarded, Mistakenly, As Separating Photography As Art From #‎ Photography As Document. But Both Are Logical Extensions Of What Photography Means: Note-taking On, Potentially, Everything In The World, From Every Possible Angle.

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

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.

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

God, Living Is Enormous!

I Think Part Of The Success Which Structuralist Or Post-structuralist Thought In Critical Theory Has Had In Literary Studies In American Universities Is Due To A Theoretical Vacuum.

American Universities

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.

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.

Indeed, The Very First Acknowledgment (as Far As I Am Aware) Of The Attraction Of Mutilated Bodies Occurs In A Founding Description Of Mental Conflict. It Is A Passage In The Republic, Book Iv, Where Plato’s Socrates Describes How Our Reason May Be Overwhelmed By An Unworthy Desire, Which Drives The Self To Become Angry With A Part Of Its Nature.

A Man Never Forgets His Body The Way A Woman Does, Because A Man Is Pushing His Body, A Part Of His Body, Forward, To Make The Act Of Love Happen. He Brings The Jut Of His Body Into The Act Of Love, Then Takes It Back, When It Has Had Its Way.

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 States Described As Apathy, Moral Or Emotional Anesthesia, Are Full Of Feelings; The Feelings Are Rage And Frustration.

In A Lot Of Writing Or Intellectual Discourse We're Starting To Use That Model: "oh, This Is Where It Comes From!" I Would Like To Concentrate On Work Which Is More Resistant To That Procedure, As I Think Fiction Is.

Photography - The Supreme Form Of Travel, Of Tourism - Is The Principal Modern Means For Enlarging The World. As A Branch Of Art, Photography's Enterprise Of World Enlargement Tends To Specialize In The Subjects Felt To Be Challenging, Transgressive. A Photograph May Be Telling Us: This Too Exists. And That. And That. (and It Is All 'human.') But What Are We To Do With This Knowledge - If Indeed It Is Knowledge, About, Say, The Self, About Abnormality, About Ostracized Or Clandestine Worlds?

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

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

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

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

Kindness, Kindness, Kindness. I Want To Make A New Year's Prayer, Not A Resolution. I'm Praying For Courage.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Paintings Invariably Sum Up; Photographs Usually Do Not. Photographic Images Are Pieces Of Evidence In An Ongoing Biography Or History. And One Photograph, Unlike One Painting, Implies That There Will Be Others.

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 Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

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

Standing Alone, Photographs Promise An Understanding They Cannot Deliver. In The Company Of Words, They Take On Meaning, But They Slough Off One Meaning And Take On Another With Alarming Ease.

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.

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

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

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

The Best Emotions To Write Out Of Are Anger And Fear Or Dread. The Least Energizing Emotion To Write Out Of Is Admiration. It Is Very Difficult To Write Out Of Because The Basic Feeling That Goes With Admiration Is A Passive Contemplative Mood.

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.

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.

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.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

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.

I Don't Want To Express Alienation. It Isn't What I Feel. I'm Interested In Various Kinds Of Passionate Engagement. All My Work Says Be Serious, Be Passionate, Wake Up.

The Quote Is Always Fascinating Because It Changes Out Of Context, Becomes Different And Sometimes More Mysterious. It Has A Directness And Assertiveness It May Not Have Had In The Original. I Think The Quality Of Inaccessibility, The Mystery, Is Important - That Whatever Matters Can't Be Taken In On Just One Reading Or One Seeing. This Is Certainly A Quality Of The Little Of Art That Lasts.

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

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.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

The Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.

Bleak Factory Buildings And Billboard-cluttered Avenues Look As Beautiful, Through The Camera's Eye, As Churches And Pastoral Landscapes.

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

On The Level Of Simple Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

There Is A Terrible, Mean American Resentment Toward A Writer Who Tries To Do Many Things.

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

[on Marriage:] It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

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

Each Generation Has To Reinvent Spirituality.

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