exhaled-spirals

[exhaled-spirals]

The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity, even a term of endearment; the word is impartial: the usage is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience—everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home […].

John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened […].

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

« This is a book about [...] why the early part of this century was such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women. [...] Those of us who came of age around the millennium lived through Britney’s descent from virginal schoolgirl to public disgrace, through Paris’s sex tape, through Lindsay’s partying. We lived through Aaliyah’s death (and the peculiar coyness around her relationship with the man who publicly groomed her), through Janet’s humiliation in Nipplegate, through Amy’s destruction by the addictions she romanticized in her music. [...]

When I say we "lived through" these things, I don't mean merely that they happened while we were alive. Nor do I mean they were somehow ordeals that we, the public, had to suffer. (Whatever suffering there was, it belonged to the women this book is about.) What I mean is that the stories of these women, as told by the tabloid press and celebrity blogs, became vehicles through which we made sense of our own existence. For the public, tearing these women to pieces was both a social activity and a form of divination. In the entrails of their reputations, we hunted for clues about what a woman ought to be, and this has always been one of the functions of celebrity women. »

— Sarah Ditum, Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s

#quote #sarah ditum #celebrity #women #society #english

[exhaled-spirals]

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations and concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature […].

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

« True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root, Must let their hands grow knotted as they move With a rough sensitivity about Under the earth, between the rock and shoot, Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit. And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred, She who could heal the wounded plant or friend With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, But now her truth is given me to live, As I learn for myself we must be hard To move among the tender with an open hand, And to stay sensitive up to the end Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. »

— May Sarton, "An Observation"

#quote #poetry #poem #may sarton #nature #gardening #english

[exhaled-spirals]

« Today’s AI technology allows people of different cultures to communicate instantly and effortlessly with one another. Wow! Isn’t that a centuries-long dream come true, weaving the world ever more tightly together? Isn’t it a wonderful miracle? Isn’t the soon-to-arrive world where everyone can effortlessly speak every language just glorious?

Some readers will certainly say “yes,” but I would say “no.” In fact, I see this looming scenario as a great tragedy. I see it as the beginning of the end of the age-old tradition of learning foreign languages [...]. The problem is that people of all cultures instinctively follow the path of least resistance.

Today’s young people [...] who grow up with translation software, will not be lured in the same way that I, as a teenager, was lured by the fantastic, surrealistic goal of internalizing another language. They won’t feel the slightest temptation to devote a major fraction of their lives to slowly and arduously acquiring the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural richness of another language. To them, someone with my self-punishing attitude would seem hopelessly wedded to the past. Why on earth cling to riding a horse or a bicycle for transportation, when you can drive a car (not to mention flying in an airplane)? [...]

[I]t strikes me as possible—in fact, quite likely—that humans are collectively going to knuckle under and throw in the towel as far as foreign languages are concerned. [...] As my friend David Moser put it, what may soon go down the drain forever, thanks to these new AI technologies, is the precious gift that one can gain only by immersing oneself deeply in another culture and thereby acquiring an entirely new set of ways of looking at the world. It’s a gift that can’t help but turn any human being into a far richer and broader one. But David fears that it may soon become as rare as hen’s teeth.

[...I]t’s incredibly depressing to contemplate the profound impoverishment of people’s mental and emotional lives that is looming just around every corner of the globe, thanks to the slick seductiveness of AI translation apps, insidiously creeping their way into ordinary people’s lives and sapping their desire to make other tongues their own.

When children first hear the sounds of another language, they can’t help but wonder: What in the world would it feel like to speak that language? Such eager childlike curiosity might seem universal and irrepressible. But what if that human curiosity is suddenly snuffed out forever by the onrushing tsunami of AI? When we collectively abandon the age-old challenge of learning the languages of other lands, when we relinquish that challenge to ultrarapid machines that have no inner life of their own but are able to give us fluent but fake facades in other languages, then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive. »

— Douglas Hofstadter, "Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late"

#quote #article #douglas hofstadter #ai #languages #english

[exhaled-spirals]

“You will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another’s horizon is.”

— Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

« It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers [...]. For instance, [Hippolyte] Taine said that to love is to make one’s goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time. »

— Lydia Davis, The End of the Story

#quote #lydia davis #love #english

[exhaled-spirals]

« Childhood should be our honeymoon period with existence. »

— Flora Nicol, Mes lettres de cachet

#quote #flora nicol #childhood #life #english #translation mine

[exhaled-spirals]

“We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?”

— J.G. Keely, reviewing Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

« The contemporary proliferation of bullshit [emerges from] various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.

These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.

Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But […] there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. »

— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

[exhaled-spirals]

« Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. […]

[James] Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.” »

— Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves

[exhaled-spirals]

—  Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

#quote #donal ryan #loneliness #english

[exhaled-spirals]

“Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. […] The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is true in the other direction. The story […] suggests that we cannot help caring about the traditions of “the west” because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a western destiny.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

[exhaled-spirals]

What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best.

— Amélie Nothomb, Loving Sabotage

#quote #amélie nothomb #loving sabotage #flowers #nature #english

[exhaled-spirals]

« The snow, History's original parchment, on which so many footsteps, so many merciless pursuits have been written; the snow that was therefore the first literary genre [...]. There remains not one fragment of this mile-wide, unfinished book [...], its fate opposite to that of the Library of Alexandria: all of its pages have melted.

But something must have remained with us, a distant memory that reappears with each new snowfall, a fear of the blank page which sparks the tremendous urge to tread its virgin expanses, and the instinct of exegesis the moment one discovers another person's trace. When you get right down to it, snow invented mystery. And in doing so, it invented poetry [...]. »

— Amélie Nothomb, Loving Sabotage

#quote #amélie nothomb #loving sabotage #nature #snow #winter #english