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It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me. And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could come up with, he said.

-- Rachel Cusk, Outline

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I said I wondered how he could fail to see the relationship between disillusionment and knowledge in what he had told me. If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new. There was a silence.

-- Rachel Cusk, Outline

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I asked her what the problem was. 'I call it summing up,' she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it only took one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn't only her own work -- she found herself doing it to other people's, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head.

-- Rachel Cusk, Outline

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A declining centre, non-contemporaneous and hence blunt contradictions on the one hand; deceivers, criminals, monumental crooked prophets on the other, who deform these contradictions and place them in the service of big business; decline of a capitalism itself which makes itself formidable: these are the three elements of German fascism. -- Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

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Coming across a footnote, Noel Coward observed, is like going downstairs to answer the doorbell while making love.

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And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Ecclesiastes 12:12

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The Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians (to say nothign for the moment of ourselves) have by their own account an historical record rooted in tradition of extreme antiquity and stability. For all these peoples live in places where the climate causes little decay, and they take care not to let any of their historical experiences pass out of their memory. On the contrary, they religiously preserve it in their public records, written by their most able scholars. In the Greek world, however, the memory of past events has been blotted out.

-- Flavius Josephus

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I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: The generic can be more intense than the concrete. [...] The extreme example -- the person who falls in love by word of mouth

-- Borges, A History of Eternity

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Casares, Ocampo, Borges

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(There) ...is what Heidegger called the hope for authenticity—the hope to be one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment.   As Heidegger emphasized, to achieve authenticity in this sense is not necessarily to reject one’s past. It may instead be a matter of reinterpreting that past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own purposes. What matters is to have seen one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives--thereby, in some measure, creating yourself. As Harold Bloom has recently reminded us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self. Autonomy, in this un-Kantian and distinctively Bloomian sense, is pretty much the same thing as Heideggerian authenticity.  For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the shadows that futurity casts upon the present”, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.   It is a premise of this culture that though the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but while it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for an intenser blaze.

-- Rorty, The Decline of Redemptive Truth

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According to Michel Serres, the only modern question is: what is it you don’t want to know about yourself?

-- Adam Phillips

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Similarly, konwledge of Greek might have withered away once again in the West. Instead it was the familiar scribal phrase: "Graeca sunt ergo non legenda" that disappeared from Western books, never to reappear. For Greek type founts could be cut, Greek grammars as well as "standard editions" of Greek texts could be issued. The duplicative powers of print fixed whatever was known in a more permanent mold, making possible the progressive recovery of arcane letters and ancient languages along with the systematic development of historical scholarhsip and its auxiliary sciences.

-- E. Eisenstein, "Clio and Chronos"

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All views of historical change are conditioned by how events have been recorded, stored, retrieved, and transmitted.

-- Eisenstein, "Clio and Chronos"

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Time as right and wrong time has the character of significance, the character that characterizes the world as world in general. It is for this reason that we call the time with which we reckon, which we leave for ourselves, world-time. This does not mean that the time we read from the clock is something extant like intraworldly things. We know, of course, that the world is not an extant entity, not nature, but that which first makes possible the uncoveredness of nature. It is therefore also inappropriate, as frequently happens, to call this time nature-time or natural time. There is no nature-time, since all time belongs essentially to the Dasein. But there is indeed a world-time.

-- Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology

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Accordingly, we should say that there are no new media, but one new medium, named the computer, the newness of which (according to Turing's proof) is that it can be all machines, and thus all media. -- Kittler, "What's New About the New Media?"

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"On n'a point besoin de faire dependre l'analyse mathématique des controverses métaphysiques."

√ (-1) is the phallus.

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema