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Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

-Susan Sontag

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Translation Is The Circulatory

Susan Sontag

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Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

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Circulatory System

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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.

To The Militant, Identity Is Everything.

The Appetite For Thinking Must Be Regulated, As All Sensible People Know, For It May Stifle One's Life.

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.

Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ours Is A Society In Which Secrets Of Private Life That, Formerly, You Would Have Given Nearly Anything To Conceal, You Now Clamor To Get On A Television Show To Reveal.

Lying Is An Elementary Means Of Self-defense.

One Man Thinks Before He Acts. Another Man Thinks After He Acts. Each Is Of The Opinon That The Other Thinks Too Much.

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

Experiences Aren't Pornographic; Only Images And Representations - Structures Of The Imagination - Are.

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.

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

In Most Modern Instances, Interpretation Amounts To The Philistine Refusal To Leave The Work Of Art Alone. Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous. By Reducing The Work Of Art To Its Content And Then Interpreting That, One Tames The Work Of Art. Interpretation Makes Art Manageable, Conformable.

To Paraphrase Several Sages: Nobody Can Think And Hit Someone At The Same Time.

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

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

I Guess I Think I'm Writing For People Who Are Smarter Than I Am, Because Then I'll Be Doing Something That's Worth Their Time. I'd Be Very Afraid To Write From A Position Where I Consciously Thought I Was Smarter Than Most Of My Readers.

Taste Tends To Develop Very Unevenly. It's Rare That The Same Person Has Good Visual Taste And Good Taste In People And Taste In Ideas.

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

You Can Go Into All Sorts Of Situations With A Camera And People Will Think They Should Serve It.

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.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

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

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.

Transparence Is The Highest, Most Liberating Value In Art - And In Criticism - Today. Transparence Means Experiencing The Luminousness Of The Thing In Itself, Of Things Being What They Are.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It Seems Positively Unnatural To Travel Without Taking A Camera Along... The Very Activity Of Taking Pictures Is Soothing And Assuages General Feelings Of Disorientation That Are Likely To Be Exacerbated By Travel.

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

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.

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.

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

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

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.

Mad People = People Who Stand Alone And Burn. I'm Attracted To Them Because They Give Me Permission To Do The Same.

Left-wing Movements Have Tended To Be Unisex, And Asexual In Their Imagery. Right-wing Movements, However Puritanical And Repressive The Realities They Usher In, Have An Erotic Surface. Certainly Nazism Is "sexier" Than Communism.

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

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.

The Last Sentence Of A Book Is, Of Course, Where You Have To Stop.

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?

Most Of My Reading Is Rereading.

Although There Is A Sense In Which The Camera Does Indeed Capture Reality, Not Just Interpret It, Photographs Are As Much An Interpretation Of The World As Paintings And Drawings Are

Nature In America Has Always Been Suspect, On The Defensive, Cannibalized By Progress. In America, Every Specimen Becomes A Relic.

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.

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

Any Photograph Has Multiple Meanings: Indeed, To See Something In The Form Of A Photograph Is To Encounter A Potential Object Of Fascination. The Ultimate Wisdom Of The Photographic Image Is To Say: “there Is The Surface. Now Think – Or Rather Feel, Intuit – What Is Beyond It, What The Reality Must Be Like If It Looks This Way.’ Photographs, Which Cannot Themselves Explain Anything, Are Inexhaustible Invitations To Deduction, Speculation, And Fantasy

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

The Solution To A Problem - A Story That You Are Unable To Finish - Is The Problem. It Isn't As If The Problem Is One Thing And The Solution Something Else. The Problem, Properly Understood = The Solution. Instead Of Trying To Hide Or Efface What Limits The Story, Capitalize On That Very Limitation. State It, Rail Against It.

When We're Afraid We Shoot. But When We're Nostalgic We Take Pictures.

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.

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.

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

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

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

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

Finally, The Most Grandiose Result Of The Photographic Enterprise Is To Give Us The Sense That We Can Hold The Whole World In Our Heads – As An Anthology Of Images. To Collect Photographs Is To Collect The World

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.

Most Men Experience Getting Older With Regret, Apprehension. But Most Women Experience It Even More Painfully: With Shame. Aging Is A Man's Destiny, Something That Must Happen Because He Is A Human Being. For A Woman, Aging Is Not Only Her Destiny . . . It Is Also Her Vulnerability.

In The United States It's Not Important Which Religion You Adhere To, As Long As You Have One.

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.

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

Art Is Not Consciousness Per Se, But Rather Its Antidote- Evolved From Within Consciousness Itself.

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.

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

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

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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.

My Emotional Life: Dialectic Between Craving For Privacy And Need To Submerge Myself In A Passionate Relationship To Another.

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

Images Have Been Reproached For Being A Way Of Watching Suffering At A Distance, As If There Were Some Other Way Of Watching.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives. Cancerphobia Taught Us The Fear Of A Polluting Environment; Now We Have The Fear Of Polluting People That Aids Anxiety Inevitably Communicates. Fear Of The Communion Cup, Fear Of Surgery: Fear Of Contaminated Blood, Whether Christ's Blood Or Your Neighbor's.

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

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

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

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 Writer's First Job Is Not To Have Opinions But To Tell The Truth... And Refuse To Be An Accomplice Of Lies And Misinformation. Literature Is The House Of Nuance And Contrariness Against The Voices Of Simplification.

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

Writing Is A Little Door. Some Fantasies, Like Big Pieces Of Furniture, Won’t Come Through.

The Shock Of Photographed Atrocities Wears Off With Repeated Viewings, Just As The Surprise And Bemusement Felt The First Time One Sees A Pornographic Movie Wear Off After One Sees A Few More.

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

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.

... One Of Art Photography's Most Vigorous Enterprises--[is] Concentrating On Victims, On The Unfortunate--but Without The Compassionate Purpose That Such A Project Is Expected To Serve.

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.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

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

I'm Only Interested In People Engaged In A Project Of Self-transformation.

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

Desire Has No History.

I Write - And Talk - In Order To Find Out What I Think.

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

World Suffering

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

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

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.

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.

Creativity Needs To Be Taken Care Of. It's Like A Big Baby That Needs To Be Nourished.

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

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.

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

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

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

I Have Always Been Full Of Lust - As I Am Now - But I Have Always Been Placing Conceptual Obstacles In My Own Path.

The Taste For Quotations (and For The Juxtaposition Of Incongruous Quotations) Is A Surrealist Taste.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Unit Of The Poet Is The Word, The Unit Of The Prose Writer Is The Sentence.

In The Final Analysis, Style Is Art. And Art Is Nothing More Or Less Than Various Modes Of Stylized, Dehumanized Representation.

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

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.

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.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

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.

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.

Writing Is Finally A Series Of Permissions You Give Yourself To Be Expressive In Certain Ways. To Leap. To Fly. To Fail.

Ambition, If It Feeds At All, Does So On The Ambition Of Others.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

It's So Effortless To Let My Loneliness Defeat Me, Make Me Mold Myself To Whatever Would (in Some Way - But Not Wholly) Relieve It. I Must Never Forget It... I Want Sensuality And Sensitivity, Both... Let Me Never Deny That... I Want To Err On The Side Of Violence And Excess, Rather Than To Underfill My Moments.

...what I Write Is Smarter Than I Am. Because I Can Rewrite It.

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

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

How Boring Just To Be A Body.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

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.

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

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.

My Urge To Write Is An Urge Not To Self-expressionism But To Self-transcendence. My Work Is Both Bigger And Smaller Than I Am.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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

Why Wouldn't You Write To Escape Yourself As Much As You Might Write To Express Yourself? It's Far More Interesting To Write About Others.

That Tendency Of Social Thought To Generalize, To Describe A Leading Tendency In A Society In Such A Way That It Seems That Everything Falls Within Its Iron Laws, Is Very Common. Of Course Our Own Experience Tells Us That Life Is Not As Monochrome As These Thinkers Depict It. On The Other Hand They Are Very Valuable Because They Alert Us To Transformations We Are Likely To Take For Granted.

The Danger, When Not Too Dangerous, Fascinate.

Literature Usually Begets Literature.

I Don't Write Easily Or Rapidly. My First Draft Usually Has Only A Few Elements Worth Keeping. I Have To Find What Those Are And Build From Them And Throw Out What Doesn't Work, Or What Simply Is Not Alive.

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.

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples.

I Have Been Told That I Am A "natural" Feminist, Someone Who Was Born A Feminist. In Fact I Was Quite Blind To What The Problem Was: I Couldn't Understand Why Anyone Would Hesitate To Do What They Wanted To Do Just Because They Were Told That Women Didn't Do Such Things.

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?

Surrealism In Painting Amounted To Little More Than The Contents Of A Meagerly Stocked Dream World: A Few Witty Fantasies, Mostly Wet Dreams And Agoraphobic Nightmares.

It Is Easier To Endure Than To Change. But Once One Has Changed, What Was Endured Is Hard To Recall.

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

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

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.

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

A Photograph Passes For Incontrovertible Proof That A Given Thing Happened. The Picture May Distort; But There Is Always A Presumption That Something Exists, Or Did Exist, Which Is Like What’s In The Picture

Jews And Homosexuals Are The Outstanding Creative Minorities In Contemporary Urban Culture. Creative, That Is, In The Truest Sense: They Are Creators Of Sensibilities. The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

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

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

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.

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.

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

My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

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.

The Process Of Building A Self And Its Works Is Always Too Slow. One Is Always In Arrears To Oneself.

Love Is Friendship On Fire -- Anonymous

Travel Becomes A Strategy For Accumulating Photographs.

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.

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.''

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.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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