— Nisargadatta Maharaj
ponderous
ponder
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
ponder
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Leonardo da Vinci
ponder
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.”
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno
truthiness
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”
~Dalai Lama XIV
ponder
"If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized. The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons. They live full time in the unreal realm of the mega-rich, yet they hide behind a folksy façade, wolfing down pizza at the Oscars and cheering sports teams from V.I.P. boxes. Meanwhile, traditional bourgeois genres are kicked to the margins, their demographics undesirable, their life styles uncool, their formal intricacies ill suited to the transmission networks of the digital age. Opera, dance, poetry, and the literary novel are still called “élitist,” despite the fact that the world’s real power has little use for them. The old hierarchy of high and low has become a sham: pop is the ruling party.The Internet threatens final confirmation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dictum that the culture industry allows the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” Champions of online life promised a utopia of infinite availability: a “long tail” of perpetually in-stock products would revive interest in non-mainstream culture. One need not have read Astra Taylor and other critics to sense that this utopia has been slow in arriving. Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive. Search engines guide you away from peculiar words. (“Did you mean … ?”) Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes."
ponder
pondering
“Deconstruction is not meant to be a soft sighing for the future, but a way of deciding now and being impassioned in a moment.”
— John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida
ponderous
(After all, it’s always other people who die.)
— Epitaph Marcel Duchamp wrote for his own tombstone
the play's the thing
— Shakespeare, Loves Labours Lost, Act IV Scene II
ponder
Each moment is a world, in flux communication with the sum of moments — what was, is, and will be: a rhizomatic web of now(s), tracings with no discernible entrance or exit. We still occupy past worlds, and look only ever toward others.
Being is comprised of the agony of the now.
ponder
All things exist in relation to what they are not. When I think of a thing, I never think of it, but always something else. There is no stand-alone thought, no autotelic image or gesture; There is, however, a heterogeneous network of all thoughts, images, gestures, and this is known as the text. There is nothing outside of this — nothing outside of the text.
pondering
“Space does not accommodate things; instead, through their erasures, things delineate space.”
— Emmanuel Levinas
ponder
"For language to have meaning there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him."
— Thomas Merton, “Disputed Questions”
ponder
The misanthrope experiences, preceding excessive socializing, an inexplicable guilt akin to that of the Christian after sex.
ars poetica
“But when we sit together, close […] we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
ponderous
"The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down."
ponder
“This alone, I surmise, constitutes the actual physiological cause of ressentiment, vengefulness, and the like: a desire to deaden pain by means of affects.”
—F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: Third Essay, §15 (excerpt).
ponder
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.
~Clare Boothe Luce
ponder
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."
~Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking
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