What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.
1w ago
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.
1w ago
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
We've made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.
We're risking the destruction of a myth. I'm very sorry about that. I hope they at least remove the Prancing Horse from that car.
2w ago
The true paradox of consciousness is that the more we know of ourselves, the more we become strangers to ourselves; for knowledge itself is a kind of forgetting—we lose the immediate simplicity of mere being in the complications of understanding what we are.
Yet Singlish not only survived but became a marker of identity, something that distinguished Singaporeans from Malaysians, from expats, from mainland Chinese, from anyone who hadn't grown up inside the particular crucible of the city-state. The government's suppression attempts arguably accelerated its cultural value, the way prohibition makes a drink taste better.
"Power comes from inside," he said. "I would look at him and say: You are not a cat; you are a tiger. For power to come out, you have to change the inside first."
3w ago
The mysterious fact about the human being is that he is not content to be a human being—he wants to be a human being plus something else. He wants to transcend himself, and the usual way he tries to do this is to become part of an even larger organism, a social group.
4w ago
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy.
Really, though, my bereavement was internal and external justification for something I would have wanted to try anyway. I've trended toward heaviness my entire life, and food has always been a font of shame.
In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise.
The tissue was just hanging there, loose and slack. My skin had seemingly doubled in size. It was drooping, deflated. I'd never seen anything like it, until I realized I had. It looked like the leg of my grandfather when he was 90 years old.
Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.
But at the end of the day, it's consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual. That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you've grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don't really need.
Black comedy's revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the other eyes upon it—or, as Collins puts it, "Black comedy that primarily serves Black audiences." Where Bennett errs, however, is in holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.
Increasingly, identity is a raw material that scammers, spammers, and even platforms can remix without your permission — unless you show up to claw it back.
Singing that felt a little bit like communicating with a much younger version of me who was concerned with being able to get better, being legitimate, and wanting to not feel shame about making mistakes. I feel like that song was written to me today, and I felt like I could answer back to that person, "Yeah, you were right to want this and want to try harder."
I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.
Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.
3mo ago
The mind creates a narrative self, a kind of ongoing story about who we are. But this narrative is a construct, no less than a novel—and like a novel, it can be rewritten.
Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…. I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.
Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else.
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
