synthetic phase

'...Thus did Constantin Brancusi describe the ceaseless accrual of detail in the realist tradition in its terminal phases, immediately before its fracture by the movement that has come to be called modernism. So what was the alternative to such unfocusing proliferations? ‘Simplicity,’ said the Romanian sculptor, ‘is complexity resolved’. Not evaded then, but resolved. Such resolution required dynamic and expressive form, a form that could cut through the infinite attenuation of detail of late realism and naturalism. It occurred to the most radical artists of modernity that there was a precedent here: not their immediate precursors in the western artistic tradition, but those from ages before, who had not even been known as artists. The ‘primitives’, whose vision was unconstrained  by any protocols involving single vanishing-point perspective or three-dimensional illusionism.'

barbarous gold

'Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.'

contradictory features

'..., the essence of the modern world is that there is no defining infrastructure. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world, but certainly chaos and confusion is often there. Basically the four spheres of our life are constantly in productive tension – politics, religion, economy and society. So there is an everlasting struggle, with no sphere triumphant. In such a situation adults have to live in a world of endless compromise, of endless situations where the best is the enemy of the good, in an Einsteinian world of relativity where all principles can be bent by some other force. It is a Dirac or Schrödinger quantum world where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. It is a world perfectly caught by the Oxford mathematician Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) when he took a child, full of absolutes, into the magical world down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass..

figuratively

'An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.'

Ritournelle

Le Boléro n'est pas une pièce musicale comme les autres. Il est une prophétie. Il raconte l'histoire d'une colère, d'une faim. Quand il s'achève dans la violence, le silence qui s'ensuit est terrible pour les survivants étourdis

Französischer Garten

Duminícă

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

(Thomas J. Watson)

Advienne que pourra

The human brain is prepackaged with a series of innate preferences widespread, from culture to culture. In terms of music we prefer repetition to randomness, consonance to dissonance, tonality to atonality, and predictability to unexpectedness. Differences in music exist around the world, but like food, there are several essential ingredients the brain is programmed to pay special attention to. Contrary to the modernist, what’s pleasurable to the ear is not arbitrary.

étrange chose

'...combien la conscience cesse vite de collaborer à nos habitudes qu'elle laisse à leur développement sans plus s'occuper d'elles et combien dès lors nous pouvons être étonnés si nous constatons simplement du dehors et en supposant qu'elles engagent tout l'individu, les actions d'hommes dont la valeur morale ou intellectuelle peut se développer indépendamment dans un sens tout différent. C'était évidemment un vice d'éducation, ou l'absence de toute éducation...'

disenchantment

'We cannot be seamlessly situated in the present moment, and also be simultaneously situated so as to create a representation. The creation of a representation requires a separation from that which is represented; we cannot simply merge into the perception. We disengage from the present and absorb ourselves...'

foreigners

'The synthesis between the desire to retain the past and the urge to forget it, to restlessly seek the new while also not wanting to throw aways the old, is described as a characteristic of modern democratic societies by Tocqueville. ‘I am not making out that the inhabitants of democracies are by nature stationary; on the contrary, I think that such a society is always on the move and that none of its members knows what rest is; but I think that all bestir themselves within certain limits which they hardly ever pass. Daily they change, alter, and renew things of secondary importance, by they are very careful not to touch fundamentals. They love change, but they are afraid of revolutions.'

Expectations in Story

'..good writing is mostly familiar with moments of unforeseen yet sophisticated new ideas, plot lines or characters. What we consider novel is relative to our experience; the more exposure we have to a genre the higher are standards are. Novelty is important because it counters habituation and influences moments of mirth, which are particularly difficult to instill in the mind of an expert.'

cohérence quantique

'...ces recherches fondamentales sur les mécanismes intimes de la physique quantique sont directement liées à la future révolution de l’informatique. La maîtrise de la superposition d’état est en effet à la base des fameux bits quantiques ou qbits qui seront les briques élémentaires des ordinateurs quantiques. Contrairement aux bits classiques qui prennent successivement la valeur 0 ou 1, les qbits fonctionnent avec une superposition de ces deux états. Et voici le chat de Schrödinger qui pointe à nouveau son nez....'