Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code; from which proposition an important corollary must immediately be drawn: the photographic message is a continuous message. Are there other messages without a code? At first sight, yes: precisely the whole range of analogical reproductions of reality—drawings, […]
Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left […]
I’m sure in the dream all that senseless agitation came wrapped in a precise and admirable mechanism, but now I don’t know what that was. The key to the code has been erased. Or is that what I should provide myself, with my deliberate work? If so, the dream doesn’t have the least use, and […]
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
If I now write, in the cafés of Paris, The Seamstress and the Wind, as I have proposed, it’s only to accelerate the process. What process? A process with no name, or form, or content. Or results. If it helps me survive, it’s only the way some little riddle would have. I think that for […]
The study of objects of time is the study of cognition and culture, but not of the sort limited to the mind or to a simpleminded notion of cultural boundaries. For most clock users, the logics used to determine the time are outside of their knowledge but within the objects. These logics have an artifactual […]
My participation in Sicilian life and civilization has taught me to mock all authority but my own. My participation in American life has tempered that and has taught me to mock my own authority. For this reason I hesitate using the first person singular, then too the I has distorted most writings on emigration, making […]
Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder. Flibertigibbet, of mopping and mowing. So many giants and demons and always room for more in poor Tom’s head. Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every […]
In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men. Of course, to say that man-made things are desirable is redundant, because man’s native inertia is overcome only by desire, and nothing gets made unless it is desirable. Such things mark the passage of time with […]
Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him. He finds himself in an inherited situation with patterns of thought which are appropriate to this situation and attempts to elaborate further the […]
I thought about what was so special about water and how it moves. A fluid responds to pressures by constantly changing shape in the most supple, flowing manner; it is neither rigid and brittle like a solid, nor volatile and insubstantial like a gas. Where do these special properties come from? From the invisible molecular […]